


The ripples they cause in the world

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-05-08 09:16:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14691060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: Four hundred years after the Destroyer's binding, the Abhorsens of the Long Cliffs face another near-forgotten enemy.Sansa, second child of Abhorsen Catelyn, struggles to claim her heritage amidst a fracturing kingdom, fighting as much against expectation as against the Dead. Her journey takes her from Wyverley College to the mountains beyond the Clayr's Glacier, battling every step in the hope that it, and she, will be enough.Along the way, she spends a great deal of time in the Clayr's Library - where better to find her answers?





	1. Prologue: Darkness has always got there first

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PanBoleyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/gifts), [Manawydan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manawydan/gifts).



> _The River is everywhere_ take two.
> 
> Title from Terry Pratchett's _Reaper Man_. GNU Pterry.

The first time Sansa walks in Death, she’s thirteen, and it’s a dare.

Mother doesn’t want any of them but Robb to go anywhere  _ near  _ Death, but Sansa’s sense for Death is so strong that she found the Free Magic creatures bound in the waterfall just by following the tug of nausea low in her belly, drawing a horrified Robb and a thrilled Arya into the deep places below the House until Robb had turned tail and run, insisting that he hadn’t been scared, that it had been his  _ duty  _ to fetch Mother, but Sansa had known better then and she knows better now.

Sansa is thirteen, and Death is never more than a sigh and a sidestep away, away from the House, so while they’re at the Midsummer’s Festival in Barhedrin, at the Wallmaker’s Wayhouse, Sansa settles comfortably on the thick, soft grass in the apple orchard, breathes in slow and deep, like she learned from her singing lessons, and sinks into the slow-moving waters that run grey and cold, even now.

She doesn’t stay long - just long enough that she knows ice and icicles will have formed on her corporeal body, back in Life - but it’s enough to make her sure that Mother is wrong. The river here is dangerous. It’s lethal, in a very real sense that never  _ made  _ sense until Sansa felt that gentle-insistent tug around her own bare ankles, dragging on the silver-embroidered hem of her deep yellow dress.

Somewhere, she hears something stir, less a sound than a sensation in the spaces behind her ears, an itch that makes her wish for the weight of her short-sword on her hip, or a chance to try Robb’s panpipes for herself.

A flash of warmth - someone touching her in Life - makes her turn away from the infinite, confining stretch of grey and nothing, and when she crosses the border into midsummer sun, Mother is screaming bloody murder at Robb, kneeling to Sansa’s right, while Dad runs his hands very carefully over her hair, the naked fear in his eyes just as frightening as the tears in Mother’s.

“You could have  _ died!”  _ Mother howls, dropping to her knees and taking Sansa’s face in her hands. “Do you realise how  _ dangerous _ that was? How  _ stupid?!” _

Robb looks stunned, because Mother has never screamed at him like that, and Arya looks a little shocked, too, but Sansa finds that she doesn’t mind, either way. Usually, she can be depended on to be beautifully behaved, to respect the rules Mother and Dad lay down for them, and this feels more a novelty than anything.

And then, Sansa realises that Mother really is scared, and all the fun goes out of it.

“Death is not a playground,” Mother says, her hands firm on Sansa’s cheeks and Dad’s hand firm on the back of her neck. “You must promise me to never walk there, not alone, not unless  _ I _ say that you’re ready - do you swear, Sansa?”

Abhorsens hold their promises very dear, more aware of the history of past Abhorsens and princes falling to Free Magic than anyone else seems to be, because of the neatly presented records of Lirael Goldenhand’s visions of the past, because of the deep scars scored into the Long Cliffs by the efforts of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters to subdue the whole of the Old Kingdom with their bound-as-dragons Greater Dead creatures, because of the cold, damp weight of Death that echos like a funeral bell in their footsteps.

Sansa lifts her hands, the same as her mother’s but smaller, softer, and presses them to Mother’s face.

“I swear,” she promises, and plans to hold to it.

But still - Mother is wrong. Sansa knows it now, or at least, she suspects it.

Robb  _ isn’t  _ the only one of them fit to wield the Abhorsen’s bells.

  
  


* * *

Granddad sits Sansa down before him, face creased and serious, and makes her hold out her hands, palm facing the ceiling.

“You’re not a Wallmaker,” he says bluntly, without any of the usual affected delicacy he uses with her, just to make her smile, “but you are my granddaughter, and I’ll not have you without defences just because you can’t forge your own weapons.”

He lays a long, slim knife across Sansa’s hands, the steel glowing warm with Charter marks, the crossguard and flat pommel embedded with chips of sapphire and the hilt wrapped in dark blue leather, even that embossed with Charter marks.

“This is yours,” he says. “It was your Granny’s, so mind it, and keep it well.”

Granny is only half a year gone, fighting down a blaze that burned through the Wayhouse while Uncle Brandon was teaching Bran how to dismantle necromancer’s bells, and Sansa’s heart throbs in her throat at the honour Granddad is bestowing on her by giving her something of her grandmother’s - it is a mark of more affection than she can understand, for him to be giving away something of Granny’s, because Sansa knows from Arya who knows from Jon who knows from Aunt Lyanna that Granddad hasn’t even gotten rid of Granny’s smelly old workboots yet.

“Thank you,” she says, so warm and filled up with love that she cannot feel the chill of Death at all, not even in the tips of her fingers. The hilt is still a little heavy for her hand, when she wraps her fingers around it, and the blade will be too long to tuck into her boot, the way Granny used wear  _ her _ knives, but it is hers now, and she will learn to use it.

Perhaps, if she is very good, and studies harder than she ever has, even at the lessons she hates, Mother will renege just a little on her promise. Sansa has read enough of the histories to know that it was not  _ always  _ just the Abhorsen and Abhorsen-in-Waiting, that there was once a whole family in blue surcoats to stand against the Dead, and she thinks that if she is the best she can be, there could be again.

 

* * *

“Tell me, little one,” Grandfather says, leaning hard on his cane as they walk the rose gardens, the shadow of the Abhorsen’s House falling away from them, Astarael sleeping below their feet and Yrael sunning himself atop her well. “Do you think what you did was wise? Or brave?”

Brave, Sansa thinks, is the way Arya sets her jaw and attends her dancing lessons, even though she  _ knows _ their dance masters will do nothing but cluck and diminish her. Brave is Bran, accepting his failing legs as a fact and working out ways to get himself around the Wayhouse without complaint. Brave is Lyanna, defying the crown to spare Jon the pain of his good-for-nothing father, or Benjen, facing down necromancers and Free Magic creatures without an Abhorsen’s bandoleer across his chest as a captain in the Royal Guard.

What Sansa did was not  _ brave.  _

“I was like you, poppet,” Grandfather says, his hair a faded rusty-white, soft in the gold of the low sunlight creeping over the high garden walls. “When our mother acknowledged Bryn as Abhorsen-in-Waiting, I was-”

Grandfather’s hand tightens atop his cane, and Sansa squeezes his arm in comfort. Uncle Bryn is not even two years dead, and it still breaks Grandfather’s heart to speak of his little brother. Sansa misses him as well, but not so keenly, if only because she never had a chance to know him even a quarter as well as Grandfather did. He was always away, flying to this town and that stedding, putting down a brace of Shadow Hands here and binding a Stilken there.

“When Brynden became Abhorsen-in-Waiting, I couldn’t understand it,” Grandfather says, steady once again. “I had worked just as hard as him, excelled just as much as he did with my studies - and I was older! It made no sense whatsoever that he be Mother’s heir instead of me.”

Sansa says nothing, knows that there is more to come, and feels her stomach swoop sickeningly when Grandfather turns to look at her with heavy, abyssally deep eyes the same sharp blue as her own.

“The sending are never wrong about these things, Sansa,” he says. “I thought, for so long, that they were about Brynden and me, but they were not. They know, and they are never wrong.”

Sansa nods, and thinks that not looking away from the millstone-weight of Grandfather’s gaze is much, much braver than stepping sideways into Death, as she had the other day.

She looks down only when she feels Yrael, sinuous and stunning in his cat-form, rubbing against her ankles.

“The old fart is right,” Yrael says, purring as though he really is just a cat who happens to be able to talk. Sansa can feel the thrum of power beneath his skin, has smelled the acrid, metal-acid smell of him when his temper rises, and she knows better than to reach down and scratch him between the shoulders, as she would any other cat. “The sending are infallible in these things, I have seen it often enough to know - but the future is never certain, else the Clayr would not be so highly prized.”

“Mogget,” Grandfather says, stern as only he is allowed to be with the Eighth Bright Shiner, “enough.”

_ The future is never certain.  _ Had anyone but Mogget-become-Yrael said it, Sansa would have dismissed it out of hand, but Yrael never says anything without meaning it.

_ The future is never certain.  _ Does that mean that Sansa might escape a doom of garden parties in Corvere as part of the Old Kingdom Diplomatic Corps, and if it does, what does that mean for Robb?

 

* * *

Robb is sitting in the Observatory when Sansa finds him later that night, long after the sun has fallen and the stars have peeped silver-sharp through the firmament of the dark sky, as if they’ve sprung straight from a Clayr’s surcoat.

The Book of the Dead is lying in Robb’s lap, closed and cold, while Robb ignores it in favour of stargazing through the telescope. He has a starchart spread over the high table to his right, a pencil in his hand, and he notes down the positions of different stars - navigational stars, Sansa thinks, trying to read it upside down - without looking away from the sky. 

Robb has a knack for astronomy that Sansa has always envied, because she was the one who always begged for stories about the stars when they were little. Robb had never minded the fairytales she liked best, but he had come home from school in Ancelstierre overflowing with hard, scientific knowledge about stars and their positions in the sky and why it was they moved about over the course of the year, why the Dragon was to the south-east at Midsummer and directly due south at Midwinter, and it had become a passion for him - a balm, something to ease his mind after the intensity of his lessons with Mother.

“Grandfather spoke with me today,” he says, still not looking away from the telescope, and the sky. “About how I may not have been making things easy for you, since I become Abhorsen-in-Waiting.”

Sansa sits on one of the low couches clustered in the middle of the room, away from the not-glass walls, and stretches out her legs. She spent some time playing with Rickon in the orchard, after she left Grandfather and Yrael in the rose garden, and then ran drills with Arya until her arms began to twitch with tiredness, and now she is here, waiting for Robb to speak, because nothing good ever comes of rushing him.

“I didn’t want to be Abhorsen-in-Waiting, Sansa,” he says, finally turning away from the telescope, but not turning toward her. “I thought I’d be like Uncle Ben, I’d join the Guard and defend the Kingdom, or maybe like Ed, go to Corvere with the Corps - I never thought I’d be Mother’s heir. I didn’t know what to do, when the sendings left those stupid bells on my bed.”

Robb had been insufferable, and Sansa had been glad that they’d only had six weeks of summer holidays to get through before both she and he were packed off to school in Ancelstierre, her to Wyverley and he to Somersby. Sansa had been sick for her first fortnight, sure she would die for the lack of the Charter, and it had taken Princess Daenerys, also attending Wyverley, two years Sansa’s senior and terrifyingly self-assured, to comfort her.

Robb, though, Robb had continued to be insufferable, when they were all at home - he made no secret of hating his lessons with Mother, and even if he seems to have grown to enjoy them, and keeps the Book of the Dead at hand more often than not, it seems more a shouldering of duty than an enthusiasm for his role. 

“I know now that I have to, though,” he says, tipping his head back to peer high up into the sky, away to where the Crow is twinkling her pinion feathers in the southern sky. “It’s terrible, and I won’t ever like it, but it has to be done - I should have known better than to dare you to step in Death, Sansa. I’m sorry.”

When he turns to face her, he has a ring of red ink around his left eye, and Sansa laughs so hard that she can’t even accept his apology.

 

* * *

Drills with Mother are harder than drills with anyone else, because Mother expects perfection - and this is the one arena in which Sansa cannot deliver.

“I’m  _ trying,” _ she insists, leaning heavy on her blunted practice sword, body aching from the effort of keeping up with Arya, never mind with Mother. “I promise, I’m trying my hardest-”

“It’s not enough,” Mother says, kind and without mercy. Her arms, bared by the sleeveless tunic she always wears when running drills with them, are corded with long, ropey lines of muscle, scarred here from a run in with a Hish and there from the bite of a Dead Hand, a burn from the shadowy whip of some Greater Dead thing curling from over her shoulder to run down her right arm as far as her elbow. Sansa’s arms are pale, the deathly-pale of all Abhorsens, lean and hard but not as muscular even as Arya’s, and she feels insignificant in Mother’s looming shadow. 

Sansa swallows against the tears in her throat, forces away the rage of annoyance that swells up through her chest at  _ never  _ being enough, and nods.

“Again,” she says, turning so she can’t see Arya’s concern, insulting if only because Arya is only  _ ten,  _ and shouldn’t feel pity for Sansa. “I need to be better.”

“ _ Sansa,”  _ Mother sighs, and Sansa can already hear the lecture she knows is coming, that she need not work so hard on this side of her training because this is not to be her life, this is not who she is to become. Arya, yes, because Arya may not have the Abhorsen look but it’s more or less agreed that should Robb fall, Arya will take his place as Abhorsen-in-Waiting, so she has to excel at this, she has to be the  _ best,  _ but Sansa is almost certainly bound for the Diplomatic Corps, bound for Corvere under Edmure’s wing, as his apprentice, until she can be sent out on her own, to the Consulate in Bain, since if she has  _ some _ talent at keeping the Dead down, she can be of use to the Scouts, hold off any threat just long enough to let the Abhorsen come down across the Wall-

“Sansa,” Mother says, tipping her face up by the chin, “why is this upsetting you so much now? It never has before.”

It’s upsetting because none of them think she’s good enough for any of the life which is her birthright, but if she says that, none of them will understand. No one in her family has ever had to struggle to fit whatever mould is laid out for them, and Sansa wonders if this is all because of those few minutes she spent standing in the river of Death, this anger and this  _ wanting.  _

Because Mother is  _ wrong.  _

Robb is  _ not _ the only one of them who’s strong enough to be part of their family. Robb is afraid of Death, and while he’ll do what needs to be done  _ because  _ it needs to be done, he won’t feel the right of it down to his bones.

Sansa had, in those few minutes in Death. She had felt,  _ yes, I could walk here and be unafraid,  _ and she wonders if maybe Mother knows that, and worries for it.

Because only necromancers are  _ really  _ unafraid in Death.

“You are not any less a part of this family if you don’t wield the bells, sweetheart,” Mother says, gentle and mortifyingly soft. “You don’t have to become a warrior to remain my daughter.”

Except Sansa knows that there are already people who look at her and find her wanting, compared with Robb and Arya, since Bran is so wholly a Wallmaker already and Rickon is still a glorified baby. Sansa is pretty, and she dances beautifully and sometimes wears flowers in her hair, and because of that people wonder what right she has to the rich blue surcoat she wears for formal occasions. 

“You said it’s not enough, that I’m not enough,” Sansa says, gesturing helplessly with her sword, almost sick with wanting to be better. “Why am I not enough?”

 

* * *

_ My dearest little friend,  _ writes Princess Daenerys, who stands only as tall as Sansa’s shoulder.  _ Jon told me that there was some sort of muddle at your Midsummer festivities, and he worries that you might be out of sorts because of it.  _

She forgets, sometimes, that Jon is Daenerys’ nephew, because it seems so  _ silly.  _ Jon is a year older than Dany, is a Wallmaker if ever there was one, and is so sensible that he seems middle-aged at sixteen. Daenerys, ethereally beautiful Daenerys who carries herself with the overwhelming confidence that comes of being a legitimate princess, doesn’t make sense as quiet, almost-shy Jon’s aunt.

But she is. And Jon tells her all kinds of things Sansa wishes he wouldn’t.

_ I so hate to see you in bad form, so I’d like to invite you to come on a little holiday with me - I’m bound for the Clayr’s Glacier next week, and I’d so like for you to come too! _

Daenerys is like a force of nature, sweeping everything aside in order to get her own way, which means this cheerful little invitation has doubtlessly been accompanied by a formal request for Sansa’s presence as Daenerys’ companion at the Glacier, sent from the King to Mother, and such requests cannot be denied.

“Your letter contains much the same news as mine, I suppose,” Mother says, standing in the door of Sansa’s bedroom with a worn, tired smile on her face. “Do you mind?”

Mother never seems to believe that Sansa truly is  _ friends  _ with Dany, but she is, and exploring somewhere new with her friend could be fun, will certainly be an escape from the lack of belonging she’s felt in the three weeks since crossing the Wall for her summer holidays, and so she smiles, and nods, and says, “Of course I don’t mind, I look forward to it!”

The sendings will pack her trunk, and will outfit her with Abhorsen blue and Wallmaker gold, silver keys and golden trowels, because Sansa fits neither of her bloodlines entirely, but they will also pack her favourite boots, the wool leggings worn soft on the inner thighs that never quite seem to wear through, the tunics that are cut just that little longer than Mother’s so they hide Sansa’s too-wide hips - Granny’s hips, but on Mother’s long legs and without Granny’s broad shoulders to balance them. The sendings always pick exactly the right clothes to suit, because the sendings are always right.

Just like they were right when they left a set of bells on fourteen-year-old Robb’s bed, and ignored eleven-year-old Sansa. Thirteen year old Sansa still hasn’t forgiven them for it, in some hidden away corner of her heart that she doesn’t let anyone see.

 

* * *

To Sansa’s absolute and complete delight, the Paperwing that will bring her to the Glacier will not be piloted by Mother or Dad, or even by Grandfather. Oh no.

Instead, Uncle Ed very nearly crashes into the landing, bounds forth out of his seat, kisses his Paperwing on the nose, and springs across the landing to greet them all with hugs and kisses and exclamations over how tall they’ve grown, especially Grandfather.

“Mummy sends her regards,” he tells Grandfather, who scowls in response, “and would like to know why you never replied to her letter at Midsummer.”

Grandmother lives in Ancelstierre, in Bain, close enough to Wyverley that Sansa sometimes spends weekends with her. She walked out on Grandfather years ago, just after Uncle Bryn became Abhorsen in his own right, and took Aunt Lysa and Uncle Ed with her. She’s Ancelstierran herself, and doesn’t understand that being an Abhorsen is more than just a bloodline or a title, not in the way someone from the Old Kingdom understands it, and had wanted to take Mother and the others away from the terrible risk she witnessed first-hand when Mother’s grandmother went down against a Mordicant, giving Grandfather time enough to get Grandmother away.

She and Grandfather exchange pages-long letters twice a year, huge reams of paper that have to be couriered over the Wall. Grandfather still wears the twined ribbons of their handfasting around his wrist, gold for love and white for fidelity, and Grandmother wears hers wound around a silver bangle, heavy above her watch, but the merest suggestion that they meet in person sends them both into a vicious rage, matched by nothing Sansa’s ever seen - or at least, nothing she had ever seen until the torrent Mother unleashed on Robb after dragging Sansa out of Death.

Edmure knows all of this. Edmure also makes a point of stirring up arguments with Grandfather, for reasons Sansa does not fully understand. Edmure is Sansa’s favourite person in the world, so she doesn’t question it too deeply. 

“Now then,” he says, ignoring the brilliant flush rising in Grandfather’s face, “I hear that there is a young lady in need of a Paperwing pilot?”

Sansa seizes his right hand, Arya his left, and he laughs as they drag him into the House - Mother is laughing too, for the first time in Sansa’s company since Midsummer, and Dad is herding everyone inside so no one has time to complain or argue or anything else.

“Corvere is  _ exceedingly  _ boring this time of year,” Edmure says, turning from Sansa to Arya and tossing half his words back over his shoulders to the others. “I had a Sunbere old boys party the night before last, and even  _ that  _ was an absolute bore - I did stop in with Mummy on the way home, though, and she was explosive with glee about Lysa’s new little baby, and warned me to tell all of you that you have to visit her at your earliest convenience.”

Grandfather huffs, and somehow manages to take Sansa’s free hand and tug her away from Edmure, and she thinks that maybe, saying Edmure is her very favourite person isn’t entirely fair.

 

* * *

Flying by Paperwing is utterly incomparable, particularly when Edmure is piloting.

Mother flies sensibly, in straight lines from here to there as efficiently as possible. Dad flies carefully, too carefully, and takes far too long to get anywhere. 

Edmure flies higher than he should, fast and in sweeping, curving lines, sometimes tipping almost all the way upside down - he’s flown the same Paperwing since he was barely older than Sansa, and they’re like friends. Sansa wishes she could fly herself, but Mother won’t allow it and Dad won’t allow it even harder.

“If you wanted to stop,” he shouts back, in that precise, sharp accent of his, closer to the accents of the Corvere girls at school than to anyone from the Old Kingdom’s, “High Bridge is about halfways, and there are all kinds of marvelous little inns in the town - my treat, poppet!”

It would be a treat, with Edmure, because everything is. Edmure is  _ fun,  _ fun in a way that no one else in Sansa’s life is fun, because Edmure’s life involves going to parties and wearing beautiful clothes, and Edmure is always smiling and laughing and telling marvellous stories, but Sansa doesn’t dare say yes. If she says yes, if she agrees to partake of Edmure’s beautiful, fun life, then maybe she’s signing herself up for that life as well.

And while Edmure’s life is beautiful, and fun, Sansa doesn’t think it makes him very happy, not really, whereas Mother’s life is hard and brutal but when she smiles, it’s with her whole soul shining out of her eyes, especially if she’s smiling with Dad.

“Can we fly on?” she shouts back, aware of how angular and broad her accent sounds compared to his. “Daenerys is expecting me!”

Edmure gives her a thumbs up over his shoulder, and Sansa sinks into the eerie calm of the slipstream, listening to the roar of the wind just beyond her ears. If she proves herself tougher than Mother thinks she is, maybe she won’t be pushed into the Corps.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She sleeps, at some point, in the roaring quiet of the Paperwing, and when she wakes, it’s to the sun rising over one of the massive peaks that hold between them the Clayr’s Glacier.

“Sunrise over Starmount!” Edmure shouts back to her, and she shakes herself awake as best she can in what little room the cockpit affords her. “Marvellous, isn’t it?”

It’s the most beautiful thing Sansa’s ever seen, but she can’t say that. It’s a bone of contention now, among the bloodlines - which home is the most beautiful? Glacier, House, Wayhouse, or palace? It’s silly, because Sansa’s never even seen the palace but she can only assume that it’s more beautiful than the homely charm of the House or the strength of the sturdy Wayhouse, and even the palace surely cannot compare to the pale golden light of the dawn shattering off the blue-white glacier below them.

She watches the ice, watches the way the colours shift from slate to storm to perfect lapis-blue, as Edmure brings them down in wide, theatrical circles. Somehow, it reminds her of the unwavering grey of Death, because the stillness of Death is the true danger, just as the Glacier’s beauty is the threat here.

She looks away only when the flash of red on the Paperwing platform catches her eye - one of the royal Paperwings, which means Daenerys has beaten her here.

“How excellent!” Edmure shouts, and Sansa can’t help but laugh. Edmure is always delighted at a chance to meet new people, or old friends, and she’s still laughing at his obvious excitement by the time the Paperwing glides to a halt in a hail of powdery snow.

There are three people, wrapped in armour and fur and oilskin, standing on the platform to greet them. Sansa flinches in surprise when her boots hit the paved platform, stunned by the chill of Death that settles right above her tailbone, and she sees Edmure righting himself too, and knows she isn’t imagining it.

“Ambassador Edmure,” the middle person says, lifting goggles with green lenses away from viciously green eyes, shining with cold dawn gold. “You are welcome to the Glacier.”

A man, taller than Edmure by an inch or so, and with a voice cooler than the air this high up the mountain. Sansa already doesn’t like him, if only because he’s ignoring her so effectively, and is further insulted when Edmure makes no move to introduce her - instead, he steps forward neatly, greets the man as  _ Bursar,  _ and bows his head with the Bursar’s in sharp, hushed conversation.

“Now, little one,” the figure to the right says - another man, only a little taller than Sansa herself, who lifts his goggles to reveal huge, dark eyes that seem to smile, even though his mouth is hidden by a scarf to stave off the wind. “You must be Abhorsen Catelyn’s daughter - come inside, leave the boring old men to their boring work.”

Sansa lets herself be herded inside by the man and the smallest of the three people, who proves herself a woman when she unwinds her scarves once they’re inside.

“I am Oberyn,” the man says, “and this is the Voice of the Nine Day Watch, my niece, Arianne.”

“Sansa,” Sansa offers, a little overwhelmed by the dazzling smiles directed at just her, “a pleasure to meet you both.”

“Ancelstierran manners,” Arianne says, clearly delighted. “How charming! Come, my lady, I believe the Princess is expecting you.”

Sansa has never met anyone of the Clayr before except in passing, usually at the Wayhouse, but she suspects that it’s highly unusual for the Voice of the Nine Day Watch to personally greet visitors of middling rank, such as herself and Edmure - it would be her job, during the holidays at the House, because Mother’s usually either away or buried in research and Robb is usually with her, and Dad is terrible with people unless he’s allowed to be terribly formal.

The chill sitting on her tailbone is sharper now, inside the mountain, and she wonders what it is that lies behind those stunning smiles - because she’s been to the Old Crossing Point at the Wall, where no one now crosses, and this Death is a shock like that, in a different way. The Old Crossing Point is weighed down, like a stone dropped on the fabric of the world, heavy with thousands of deaths and the Destroyer’s taint four centuries past, and that weight catches the gut and  _ drags.  _

This Death is shockingly fresh, brand-new and startling, so Sansa must ask.

“If I may,” she says, tentative, “has there been a recent death? I only ask because I would not wish to disrespect-”

Blaring klaxons, like the sirens on the Perimeter, interrupt her, and the Voice and her uncle look at one another in what Sansa can only think of as horror.

“A very recent death, apparently,” Oberyn says, wrapping an arm around Sansa’s shoulders and tugging her toward the elevator on the far side of the Paperwing hangar. “Come, Lady Sansa, we’d best get you to safety - Tywin! Bring the Ambassador!”

Edmure and the Bursar are just inside the door now, and Edmure rushes forward to gather Sansa close without even taking off his purple-lensed goggles, all while the Bursar shuts the door and scowls.

“The lady says she feels a death,” Arianne says, serene in robes that seem far too white for the gloom of the hangar, now that she’s shed her outer clothes, “and now the sirens are calling - I think we’ve had a murder, Tywin. Please run on ahead and have the twins brought to the scene, won’t you?”

Sansa watches closely as the Bursar’s scowl turns to a snarl, watches as he spins on his heel and takes off down the stairs nonetheless, Charter marks glowing in his hand like gold coins as he goes. The Voice, Arianne, looks serene, but her uncle looks like a firework with a lit fuse, perfectly still but ready to burst into action.

“Come, Lady Sansa, Ambassador,” Arianne says, gesturing to the elevator. “Let’s get you to your quarters.”

 

* * *

They are placed not in the Abhorsen’s rooms, but in fine guest chambers near to the Library - Sansa has never been in the Abhorsen’s rooms, of course, but it feels like a slight to be roomed elsewhere, regardless of Edmure’s station.

Do they look at Sansa, in her blue surcoat, and See what she would look like in ambassadorial purple? If she asks, would beautiful Arianne, in her crown of moonstone and silver, tell her the truth of her future?

“Fair warning, little one,” Oberyn says, as he nudges the sending behind the door into action. “You’ll be inundated with attention while you’re here - there’s been quite a stir over you, this past few weeks.”

Edmure turns, razor-sharp, and puts a hand on her shoulder - guarding and warning all in one.

“Oh?” Sansa says, unsure of just what  _ a stir _ might be in the Clayr’s Glacier.

“Oh indeed,” Arianne says, frowning. “Come away, uncle, you know we’re not to discuss such things-”

“No,” Edmure says, still sharp, “if the Watch has Seen my niece, she has a right to know what was Seen.”

Arianne waves Oberyn out of the room, and he goes with a shrug - but also with a speculative glance in Sansa’s direction. 

“It was a slip of a vision,” the Voice says, “but no less a true Seeing for its brevity-”

“Arianne,” Edmure says. “We have been friends for many years - I know when you’re lying.”

The Voice smiles, and Edmure blushes, and the Voice nods.

“We’ve Seen you exactly once, Lady Sansa, two weeks ago, when my… Friend, Cersei, was the Voice of the Nine Day Watch. When we Saw you, you were older than you are now, maybe a decade older, and you were being handfasted to a member of the Clayr.”

“Oh my,” Edmure says, filling the silence of Sansa’s shock. “That’s quite the vision.”

“The reason you will be subject to undue and probably impolite attention,” Arianne says, “is that Cersei couldn’t keep her fat mouth shut, and told her  _ odious _ little wart of a son, and he shouted all over the Glacier that he was going to marry the Abhorsen’s daughter and sire a line of Remembrancers.”

“That isn’t how Remebrancing works,” Sansa says, because she can’t think of anything else to say. If, in a decade, she’s still recognisably  _ the Abhorsen’s daughter,  _ then in a decade, she mustn’t be in the Ambassadorial Corps. She mustn’t have been tucked away out of trouble, mustn’t have been discounted as too soft to help Mother in her duties.

“The Bursar’s grandson,” Edmure says, flat and cold and full of rage, “will marry Sansa only if I’m too bloody dead to stop him.”

Sansa is surprised by that, because Edmure is  _ never  _ angry, and because she’s never heard him speak against someone so vehemently before, but she takes him at his word - he’s spent more time with the Clayr, and must know something horrid of the Bursar’s grandson. Sansa doesn’t know many young men, since Wyverly remains staunchly all-girls, so she thinks it might be best to agree with Edmure on this. Maybe Dany will have opinions - she usually does.

“Most of us feel the same,” Arianne assures him, smiling. “We are doing everything within our power short of killing him to keep Joff from breeding.”

Edmure nods, sharp and perfunctory, and is just opening his mouth to say something else when Arianne’s face goes blank and disconcertingly smooth.

“Do excuse me,” she says, once expression has returned, “but I will be needed in the Lower Refectory in just a moment - please, make yourselves at home. The sendings will have brought your things.”

“Excuse her,” Edmure says, once she’s disappeared out the door. “The Clayr take some getting used to - their control over the Sight isn’t as complete as they’d like everyone else to think, particularly not for the Voice of the Nine Day Watch.”

“You’ve spent a great deal of time here, haven’t you?” Sansa says, wandering over to the huge windows that look down over the spread of the glacier to the valley beyond. “I wouldn’t have thought your duties would allow such travel.”

“My duties aren’t quite so restrictive as Cat lets you and the others think,” Edmure says, looking more than a little sheepish. “I spend roughly half the year in Corvere, then part in Belisaere, and the rest doing as I please - I’m not the First Ambassador, after all. Poor bastard has to spend the entire year in Corvere, except a week each for Midwinter and Midsummer.”

Edmure chats on, telling her of this party in Corvere and that soiree in Bain, of shindigs he’s attended in Edge and of the strange festivals the northern barbarians hold at odd times of the year, and Sansa listens with half an ear. She’s more focused on the sickly feeling that’s weighing low in her belly, Death and something else, and on wondering when she’ll get to see Daenerys. 

“Sansa? You still in there, sweetheart?”

Edmure’s watching her curiously, as if trying to decipher her, and she blushes under the scrutiny. He always sees more of her than she’d like, because while she  _ does  _ wish Mother would have more faith in her, she doesn’t want Mother to know that she wishes for that. It would only upset her, and cause a row.

“Just wondering where Dany is,” she says, forcing cheer into her voice and smiling. “Is this where you usually stay, Edmure? When you’re here?”

“I usually stay in Cat’s rooms - the Abhorsen’s chambers, that is,” he admits, “which makes this even stranger.”

“So the Voice of the Nine Day Watch doesn’t usually greet guests, then,” Sansa says, smiling a little more genuinely. “And the Glacier doesn’t usually feel like Death?”

“And the Charter doesn’t usually feel… twisted in on itself,” Edmure agrees. “I’m going to find Viserys, poppet, I’ll send Daenerys to you-”

“I’m not staying here on my own!” Sansa cuts in. “There’s a  _ murderer,  _ Edmure!”

“Yes,” Edmure agrees, “and Viserys and I will join the hunt, and leave you and Princess Daenerys here under careful guard. Don’t  _ dare  _ argue, or I’ll tell your mother you put yourself in danger. How’s that?”

“That’s  _ completely  _ unfair!” she fumes, so angry she stamps her foot. “Mother would  _ kill  _ me if she thought I’d gone out chasing a murderer-”

“Especially in the Glacier, where the murderer could be just about anything, given that library of theirs,” Edmure says, smug with victory. “Arianne will probably have Seen my plan, so Viserys and Daenerys should be arriving-”

“Right now,” comes another voice, and Sansa jumps, so surprised she forgets to be angry. “Hello, Ed, Lady Sansa.”

Prince Viserys is very much like Dany, with the same beautiful face and lovely fair hair, but there’s something fierce about him that Dany doesn’t seem to have grown into yet. He looks much more the heir to the madness and magic that drove Aegon and his sisters to evil, and Sansa would be afraid of him, if not for the gold-and-green ribbons twined around his wrist.

Edmure is wearing gold-and-green as well. She noticed earlier, but forgot to ask him about them.

“Betrothal ribbons!” she gasps, gold for love and green for a promise. “Edmure! You never said!”

It’s been unspoken but acknowledged that Edmure’s been  _ involved  _ with Prince Viserys since they were at Sunbere together - the royal family doesn’t really  _ get on _ with anyone else, thanks to the King’s behaviour with Aunt Lyanna, so that’s been something of a hurdle for them. But this is… This is  _ huge. _

“Mummy said  _ just  _ the same thing,” Daenerys says, pushing past Prince Viserys to sit on the trunk under the window that looks out over the glacier. “Isn’t it intolerable of them to keep so many  _ secrets,  _ Sansa?”

“Not this again, Dany,” Viserys sighs. “I told you, I don’t  _ know _ anything yet-”

“But you  _ suspect,” _ Dany snipes. “Has Edmure told you of any of his  _ suspicions,  _ Sansa? Because so far as I can make out, this murder they’re going to investigate is the result of in-house rivalries among the Clayr - but I can’t be trusted with the truth!”

“Because, Daenerys,” Viserys says, rolling his eyes at what is obviously an argument they’ve repeated more than once, “I don’t know anything! So I have nothing to tell you!”

Edmure is smiling fondly, arms folded over his chest, and Sansa would quite like to be angry still, but she can’t be in the face of that soft little smile of his. How absolutely abominable of him! 

“When did you agree?” she asks, ignoring Dany and Viserys’ argument. “Did you ask? Have you spoken to Grandfather about it? Or the Queen Dowager?”

“Viserys spoke to the Queen Dowager for both of us,” Edmure says, “and I spoke to Mummy  _ and  _ to Dad about it within the last week - we only agreed last month. Ah. I may have been tipsy when I asked.”

“You were roaring drunk,” Viserys tells on him, grinning. “And you asked when you did specifically to get a rise out of the First Minister, and you know it.”

“I was going to ask  _ anyway,”  _ Edmure insists, looking harassed now. “But yes, asking when I asked did have the added benefit of leaving Brereton with his knickers in a twist. Can’t blame me for that.” 

“This is all quite beside the point,” Dany says. “I want to catch a killer, Vis! Do say yes. Go on. Say yes.”

“Hmm,” Viserys says, coming around to link his arm through Edmure’s, leaning his head thoughtfully against Edmure’s shoulder. “No. Absolutely not. Mother would kill me.”

Sansa sits down beside Dany and sighs.

“This is a  _ rubbish _ holiday,” she says. “How are we supposed to explore the Glacier if there’s a  _ murderer  _ about?”

“Very carefully, until the murderer’s been put down,” Edmure says cheerfully. “Now be good girls and don’t stir - Arianne’s probably already arranged a guard, so no funny business.”

They’re gone before Sansa or Dany can argue any further, much to Dany’s demonstrable frustration. Sansa has only seen two of Dany’s tantrums in the two years they’ve been friends, and she would have rathered see no more - but there’s no escape, not in these lovely but impersonal guest chambers.

“I wish we could’ve stayed in the Abhorsens’ rooms,” she sighs, folding her arms on the window ledge to look out over the glacier. “At least there’s probably some decent books there.”

“Mummy would’ve arranged for there to be sweets if we were staying in the royal suite,” Dany agrees, morose. “Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to make our own entertainment, won’t we?”

Sansa has heard a few rumours about Dany’s taste for  _ entertainment,  _ and blames her quiet, isolated childhood for how much she dislikes the idea of  _ kissing games.  _ She’s shy, too, which doesn’t help, but she hopes Dany knows her well enough to know that she wouldn’t be interested in that sort of diversion.

“Tell me,” Dany says, “about your little misadventure at Midsummer.”

Buggery.

 

* * *

By the time sendings appear with food, the sun has set enough to turn the glacier entirely to flame outside the window, and Daenerys has asked every imaginable question about Sansa’s little journey into Death. 

She’s also asked quite a few questions about  _ Robb,  _ much to Sansa’s annoyance. Sansa has done her best to say that Robb is off-limits without saying it outright, because Robb hasn’t told Mother and Dad that he’s been writing weekly letters to Wynafryd Manderly for the past year, and it isn’t Sansa’s place to reveal that to just anyone.

Still, they’ve plenty to fill the hours. Gossip from school, gossip from court, gossip from the Wayhouse. They play card games with a curious old deck Dany found in one of the drawers, painted by hand and shining each with a single silvery Charter mark - curious, old magic that Sansa only recognises because she’s seen it in books in the Wayhouse. The cards do their job, only sparking a little when Dany slaps down too hard during a round of Snap, but even after Sansa wins two week’s worth of desserts from Daenerys during a game of rummy, they’re bored. They’re  _ horrifically  _ bored.

“What we could do,” Dany says, low and conspiratorial, “is-”

“I wouldn’t, Princess,” comes a cheerful voice from the other side of the room. A  _ ridiculously  _ pretty girl with shiny brown hair longer even than Sansa’s own curling over her white tunic is leaning around the door, smiling charmingly but watching very carefully.

Sansa can feel Dany’s hackles raise - the girls of Magistrix Woollenden’s class in Wyverley are used to being  _ watched,  _ by those rare few idiots who’ve come north from Corvere, and this girl looks every bit as suspicious of them as their schoolmates do. She’s just hiding it a little bit better.

“I’m Margaery,” she says, letting herself in and closing the door behind herself. She’s smaller than Sansa, but taller than Dany, and looks a little older than them both, too. “How do you do?”

“Why wouldn’t you, Miss Margaery?” Dany asks. “You don’t even know what we were going to do.”

“You were going to find the swords you’ve both packed in your trunks,” Margaery says, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “Then you were going to make you way to the Library, to try and find the murderer before your brother and uncle.” 

Dany scowls, but Sansa can’t help laughing.

“Dany, she’s  _ Clayr,”  _ Sansa says. “She has the  _ Sight. _ ”

“Well, that,” Margaery says “and Prince Viserys warned us that he’d seen you pack your sword, and Lord Edmure told us the same thing about you, Lady Sansa.”

“I didn’t hide that I was packing a sword,” Sansa points out reasonably, very firmly not thinking about the things she  _ did  _ hide in her pack. “I was wearing it until it started poking me in the ribs, about an hour out from the Glacier.”

“That said,” Margaery says, “I’ve been sent to dissuade you  both from leaving your room. They thought I’d be a better distraction than my brothers, and the only thing the current Voice’s people and mine agree on is that we _hate_ the Bursars’ people.”

“Everyone seems to hate the Bursars’ people,” Sansa says, wondering just how bad they can be. “Who…  _ are  _ the Bursars’ people?”

Margaery hesitates, just long enough to make Dany bristle all over again.

“Well,” she says, “there are politics within the Glacier, just as there are anywhere. Ah.  _ Factions.  _ The Bursars’ people are one faction. My father is Quartermaster, we’re another faction. The Voice’s father is Chief Librarian, and there are always… Squabbles.”

“In-house rivalries,” Daenerys says, sounding a little smug. “I’m a  _ princess,  _ Miss Margaery, I know all  _ about _ infighting.”

“Yes, well,” Margaery sniffs. “Things are rather more complicated when we all make sure to See one another’s next moves in this game we play. That’s an added danger that none of  _ you _ have to worry about.”

Sansa is a little baffled by the very idea of fighting with family in any sort of genuinely mean-spirited way - herself and Arya bicker like washerwomen, there’s the unpleasantness between Grandmother and Grandfather, and Uncle Brandon and Uncle Benjen have the strangest relationship, but there’s no  _ malice  _ in it. There’s no real unkindness or real desire to hurt, the way she’s noticed in Dany’s stories of her family. 

She doesn’t like the idea of having the Sight mixed into that balance. It can be hard enough to keep track of everything in the present without tipping the future in on top.

“Politics are all well and good,” Sansa says, “but I’m rather more interested in the murder.”

“How terribly Abhorsen of you, Sansa,” Dany chides. “Honestly, who’d rather talk about a  _ death  _ than  _ politics?” _

Sometimes they’re one and the same, Sansa knows, but it wouldn’t do to say so around Dany. Dany lives and breathes the kind of cut-throat politics they play in Belisaere and Corvere - truthfully, she’d be an ideal First Ambassador, someday in the future - but Sansa feels out her depth even in just the politics at school. She’d rather be ankle deep in Death than knee-deep in the malicious gossip that spins the rumour mill at Wyverley.

But that’s not a statement for delicate company such as this. It’s not for any company save Arya’s and Bran’s, and maybe Lyanna’s and Brandon’s. Everyone else looks at her strangely when she says things like that.

“Well,” she says, for want of anything better, “it happened  _ as _ Edmure and I landed. I felt it. Of course I’m interested. And don’t pretend you  _ aren’t,  _ Daenerys, you’ve been clamouring about hunting down the murderer for hours already.”

Dany does her best to affect an air of innocence, but Sansa knows her too well to believe it for even a heartbeat. Dany has never been very good at pretence.

“Alright, yes,” she admits. “I would very much like to go and get a look at this murderer. I’ve only ever seen the kind that hangs in Belisaere, and  _ they’re  _ no fun! This one might be some kind of sorcerer! Or, or a  _ necromancer-” _

“There is nothing fun about necromancy,” Sansa snaps. Daenerys… Ah, she doesn’t understand. The royal line is one of the bloodlines, of course it is, but they’ve no gifts. They’ve the weight of the realm, but not of anything beyond it.

Margaery looks as if she might understand the sharpness of Sansa’s tone, but Dany looks a little miffed. Sansa is usually a great deal more deferring to Dany, but then, they don’t usually talk about  _ necromancy  _ at school. It’s somewhat démodé to talk about Sansa’s heritage south of the Wall, for reasons she doesn’t fully understand given the enormous bloody monuments to Abhorsens Sabriel and Lirael and Maegette and brave, bloodied, beaten-but-victorious Torrhen, the last half-Wallmaker Abhorsen, the only Abhorsen to ever  _ retire  _ his bells and sword.

“How very Abhorsen of me, I know,” she says mildly, “but there are certain things that we’re raised to respect, at the Abhorsen’s House.”

“Well said,” Margaery murmurs. “And if I may, ladies,  _ you _ are never going to get out of these rooms because we’re Watching you - or, Princess Daenerys, anyway, since there seems to be a talent among the Abhorsens that makes you more difficult to See. I, however, can See what the others See, and I have a fair idea how to get you out and about.”

 

* * *

The Great Library of the Clayr is magnificent, but also somehow less fantastic than Sansa always assumed it would be.

“Yes, well,” Margaery says testily to Daenerys’ verdict of  _ drab,  _ “you can take it up with the Chief. He’s probably in his office. I can introduce you right now, if you want.”

“Or,” Sansa says, pressing her hand over the concealed pocket in her surcoat, “we could  _ go in. _ ”

Margaery is Seeing ahead for them, so they’ve managed to avoid all the patrols, but Sansa can feel the cold of Death clinging to the back of her neck and under her arms, the metallic tang of Free Magic settling on the back of her throat

And that… Twist on the Charter. That’s not good. That’s  _ bad.  _ That is very, very bad, because Sansa has felt it before, on a much smaller scale, when the necromancer’s bells ran riot at the Wayhouse and burned Brandon’s Chartered pot-bellied stove, and Granny with it. 

“There’s something wrong with a Charter stone,” Sansa says, and she knows by Dany’s queasy face and the wavering of Margaery’s silvery Charter light that they can feel it too. “And there’s a new death just up ahead, and some sort of Free Magic thing a little further on beyond that.”

Margaery’s eyes slide blank, and slide back.

“Your uncle and your brother are just ahead, too,” she says, drawing a very plain but heavily spelled short sword from the scabbard on her hip. Daenerys has had her sword drawn since they entered the Library, a fine old relic of the royal line with the golden tower engraved into the hilt, and Sansa has her own half-drawn, just in case. “A few of my people, and… Something else, I can’t See what.”

Sansa draws her sword fully, and settles herself so the weight of Granny’s dagger rests easy on her hip. 

“Onward, then,” Dany says, and takes the lead - Sansa thinks she ought to lead herself, but doesn’t say so, because then she’ll have to explain  _ why,  _ and the slinking dread climbing her spine isn’t the kind of reason that will convince Daenerys. “Come on, Sansa and I are here for a holiday, and this is the most fun either of us are likely to have this year.”

“Lady Sansa said there was a fresh  _ death _ just ahead, Princess,” Margaery says uneasily. “I hardly think that counts as fun.”

Sansa’s stomach lurches when they breach the next sweep of the Library’s curve, overwhelmed with the steel-screech scent of Free Magic and the copper-bright stench of blood. She can feel Charter warmth and Charter break, too, and the cold of Death creeping along under all of it.

Round the corner, it’s a massacre. There are two men in Clayr green surcoats on the ground, one obviously the new death and the other alive, just about. Edmure’s face is bloodied, Prince Viserys is carrying his sword arm, and the beautiful woman with the bright golden hair has her swords crossed with a Stilken.

Sansa pauses as sparks fly, Charter-gold and Free Magic bloodied silver, because a  _ Stilken! _ She’s read the stories about Lirael Goldenhand, she knows that there are terrors trapped in the Clayr’s Library, but to actually see a Stilken in the flesh - she’s never known fear like it. She’s never felt  _ anything  _ so horrible as this.

The beautiful woman with the twinned golden swords falls aside, tossed like a ragdoll against the curving wall, and then the Stilken rounds on Edmure - drawn by the scent of his blood, no doubt - and drawing its hideous claws back to strike-

Sansa reaches for the pouch at her waist. Not for Granny’s dagger, which even with all its enchantments would be no use against a creature such as a Stilken, but for what lies beneath it.

And she blows on Saraneth.

She isn’t supposed to have the panpipes, of course, and isn’t sure how she got them out past the sendings, but she’s glad of it now. She is so, so glad, because when she blows on Saraneth, when she forces her will down on the Stilken’s sloping shoulders, it stops.

For as long as she’s blowing on Saraneth, Edmure is safe. So she works her will down on the Stilken, and she makes herself calm down, and she makes herself breathe properly - circular, in through her nose and out through her mouth at the same time, just as her singing mistress taught her. If she gets this wrong, Edmure dies. He’s injured, concussed judging by the stunned way he’s looking up at the Stilken, and if she fails, he’s dead. 

She gets to Ranna before the Stilken can move, and leaves it swaying, leaves it slumping back away from Edmure, back toward the fallen Clayr woman.

Saraneth sings again, low and smooth, and the half-sleeping Stilken goes still. Very still.

The man from before, Oberyn, draws a bottle of dark green glass from inside his robe, and the odd looking silvery-haired boy beside him brings forth a candle.  _ Binding.  _ Yes. She can do this. She can. She  _ must. _

She blows harder on Saraneth, a harsher note, and the Stilken surges toward the two - moulding and shifting as it goes, shrinking and bubbling and-

Into the bottle. The boy has the candle light and dripping onto the bottle before she’s even stopped blowing Saraneth. As soon as she stops and gulps in a breath, she realises that the scent of Free Magic is gone - she  _ won! _

But the whole corridor still reeks of blood. The Charter still feels twisted and skewed, and she can still feel the dead man’s absence like a bucket of ice down her spine. This isn’t what she thought it would feel like. 

The others rush around her - Dany to Viserys, Margaery to the injured Clayr man on the ground, the Clayr still standing darting here and there to their fallen. But Sansa finds that she can’t quite move, except to lower the pipes from her mouth.

“If you wouldn’t mind, sweetheart,” Edmure calls, “I could do with a hand up.”

She dives forward at that, but she hardly knows what she’s doing - she has him on his feet with his arm around her shoulders, but she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know anything just now, except that she’s terrified of what she just did.

“Sansa,” Edmure says, slurring just a little. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

She shakes her head, not quite daring to speak, and guides him along toward where the Clayr are congregating with their wounded. She’s no healer, but there ought to be someone among them who can see to Edmure’s injuries.

“Bloody blasted buggering bastards,” Prince Viserys snarls, Dany trailing behind him with both their swords. “You alright, girls? Ed?”

“Concussed as all bedamned,” Edmure says cheerfully, “and I’ve a sprained shoulder, I think, but beyond that I’m right as rain - you?”

“Broken arm, dislocated elbow,” Viserys says, something manic shining in his purple-blue eyes. “Good show, Ed, I particularly liked the bit where it smashed you against the wall.”

“I was very proud when you tried to block its hooks with your sword,” Edmure returns, and then leans to the side and vomits spectacularly all over a passing Clayr’s boots.

“This is all very touching and romantic,” Daenerys says, “but I think Sansa is having a panic attack, so if you two great lumps could please sit down I’m going to slap her.”

Edmure and Viserys sit on the floor against the wall, and Daenerys lifts back her hand to slap Sansa across the face. Somehow, Sansa catches Dany’s wrist before she can make contact, but just the threat of it seems to be enough to snap her out of the sickness.

“That was  _ revolting, _ ” she manages. “I- are the bells the same, Ed?”

“I’ve never used them, sweetheart,” he admits. “But from what I’ve read, they’re easier - they’re made to be strong. The pipes are just for practice.”

She sits down beside him, leaning against his shoulder and wrapping both her arms around his bicep, and she doesn’t say another word until Oberyn of the Clayr comes and crouches before them.

“Here,” he says, pressing a hand glowing with Charter marks to Edmure’s forehead with a grin. “A cure-all that should take care of your concussion - Vis, we’ve got someone coming to set your elbow before we heal you. Shouldn’t be long.”

Viserys hums an affirmative, leaning against Edmure’s other shoulder, and Oberyn turns to Sansa.

“You, my little Abhorsen,” he says, “have surprised everyone with that little show - and believe me, it isn’t easy to surprise anyone in the Glacier.”

“Obe- oh, hello Vis,” says the odd-looking boy who sealed the bottle, before. Dany is already leaning up on her toes to kiss his cheek, and Sansa tries to figure why he looks so familiar. “Ambassador Edmure, Lady Sansa, pardon the interruption - Obe, I’m heading down to the Stone now, Jaime and Gerold are coming with me, do you still want to come?”

“Bring the Princess,” Oberyn says, “and bring one of the Quartermaster’s boys, and see if Quentyn’s about. He should be with Jaime’s patrol, I think.”

The boy nods, bows at the waist, and turns to go.

“Oh, Egg!” Oberyn calls after him. “If you see your mother at all, do  _ not _ tell her you fought a Stilken. Let me break that news, alright?”

_ Egg.  _ Charter preserve her, that’s Jon’s  _ brother!  _ That’s  _ Prince Aegon! _ He isn’t nearly as good-looking as Sansa assumed he would be, given how pretty Daenerys is and how handsome Viserys is. 

“Now, Lady Sansa,” Oberyn says, settling back onto his hunkers again and looking at her closely, as if she might reveal some great secret if he just looks hard enough. “Tell me - who taught you to play your panpipes?”

“I- no one, ser,” she says. “I just knew.”

“Did you indeed,” Oberyn says, looking  _ thrilled. _ “And tell me - how old were you when you first read the Book of the Dead?”

Edmure goes very, very still beside her, and Sansa is fairly sure she’ll combust from the blush spreading up her neck. Bad enough she played the pipes, bad enough she threw in against a  _ Stilken,  _ but if Mother finds out that she borrowed the Book from Robb’s room when he flew out with Mother and Dad to fight those Shadow Hands near Nestowe, well. Well!

“Um,” she gets out, and Oberyn grins wider.

“My dear little Abhorsen,” he says, “this changes  _ everything. _ ”

 

* * *

Margaery is the one sent to guide them to the Infirmary - and reveals the Infirmarian to be her aunt, a fantastically gifted Seer whose visions are so frequent and fractured that she’s retired to something called a Dreaming Room, most of the time, because she’s barely lucid.

She seems perfectly lucid when she strides forth to reset Viserys’ arm, a magnificent, tall woman with a huge pile of silver hair on top of her head and eyes like blue diamonds, hard and unwavering.

“Well met, all of you,” she says briskly, and before she’s even said that much Viserys is howling, and his elbow is back in line. “Pipe down, I’m trying to say hello. I am Infirmarian Malora. How do you do.”

“It’s best to do the introductions  _ before  _ you set to work, auntie,” Margaery says in long-suffering tones. “But now that you’ve done both, do you think you could finish with the Prince so you can have a look at Willas?”

Willas, Sansa learned on the way here from the Library, is Margaery’s eldest brother - he was the Clayr with the bloody leg in the Library, apparently - just as she’s been reminded that Oberyn is  _ Queen Elia’s brother,  _ Charter save her but she feels like an idiot for all of this. 

Viserys is grumbling again, and Sansa is distracted by the gentle way Edmure settles his hand against the back of the prince’s neck - Mother does just the same thing when Dad or one of them is sick or injured, and she’s seen Aunt Lysa do it to Robin and Alayne, too.

“You didn’t tell me  _ Willas  _ was injured!” Infirmarian Malora says, clamping both her hands around Viserys’ arm and setting it glowing with a burst of Charter marks that makes him yelp. “Here, princeling, you’re healed, eat something and don’t do any heavy lifting - out! All of you, out! I only get an hour or so at a time before the Sight slaps me over the head again, so shoo! Shoo!”

Sansa presses a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, and Dany is doing the same - Margaery looks mortified to the point of death, and Edmure is too busy helping Viserys to his feet to react either way. 

“We’re going to bed,” Edmure announces, once they’re all upright and fairly settled. “As are you two, since you’ve had a very long day of doing nothing, and then an hour of doing an awful lot.”

“Oh,  _ Edmure-” _

“Don’t think you and I won’t be having a  _ very _ serious conversation about your having the pipes with you, miss,” he warns. “And that you  _ used  _ them!”

“She did save your life in doing so, Ed,” Viserys says as they hobble toward the door, the voice of reason. “And mine, and likely a dozen others in the Library.”

“That isn’t the  _ point,  _ Viserys,” Edmure protests. “You aren’t one of us, you don’t  _ understand _ just how dangerous this was! And- and Oberyn said you’ve read the Book, Sansa! What were you  _ thinking?” _

“I was thinking,” Sansa says primly, cowering a little and holding onto her pipes, through the pouch, “that there’s an awful lot of things to be done, and only Mother and Robb to do them.”

There’s nothing more to be said until they leave Dany and Viserys at the royal family’s chambers, which involves a great deal of kissing for Edmure and Viserys, and a great deal of pointedly looking away for Dany and Sansa. Sansa’s thrilled for Edmure, she really is, but she’d like to be thrilled later, when she isn’t shaky with a sudden exhaustion and desperate for a bath.

“Alright,” Edmure says, nudging her along in the wake of the cowled sending that’s come for them. “Start at the beginning. Tell me  _ why. _ ”

“Because,” Sansa says, “I’m  _ good  _ at it, Edmure.”

 

* * *

Mother and Dad are waiting on the landing platform when they get back to the House the next day, and by the look on Mother’s face, Edmure has obviously sent a message hawk on ahead.

Buggery.

Dad doesn’t give her a chance to make excuses - he hauls her out of the Paperwing while she’s taking her goggles off, and keeps her bundled her up in his arms until they’re halfway to the fig tree on the north lawn. 

“ _ What _ ,” he shouts, throwing her down to land smack on her arse,  _ “were you thinking?” _

“Ned,” Mother says, sounding as exasperated as Edmure had at Prince Viserys, “stop shouting.”

The sound of the falls is deafening in the silence that follows, and Sansa cowers, just a little. Mother stands very, very tall, Dad at her right hand and Edmure at her left, and they all look very stern and very angry.

Sansa doesn’t think Edmure’s  _ ever  _ been angry with her before. Maybe it’s just because her acting an Abhorsen cut short his time with Prince Viserys.

“So,” Mother says. “You’ve read the Book? Played the pipes?”

“I bound a Stilken,” Sansa manages, feeling just a little faint. “Like Lirael Goldenhand.”

“Hmph,” Mother says. “Well, we’ll see you have more training than she did before we send you up against the Destroyer, what do you think?”

She smiles, though, and holds out her hand. Sansa takes it, lets Mother heave her upright, and dares a smile in return - it seems to go over well. 

“I’ve been unfair to you, sweetling,” Mother says. “Perhaps there’s more of me in you than we thought.”

Sansa just about bursts with pride at that - she’s never been claimed by  _ either  _ side of the family before, and she thinks she might just come to like it.

 


	2. The Abhorsen-in-Waiting's Apprentice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time no talk, eh?

“Alright then, Miss Sansa,” Grandmother says, braiding a black-and-white Wyverley ribbon through Sansa’s hair. “Ready for your last walk through those hallowed gates?”

Grandmother’s house is only twenty minutes from Wyverley, so Sansa has spent the weekend with her - the last weekend. She’s going back in today for senior prizegiving, which is her very last hurrah. It might be sadder if half her classmates hadn’t started turning away from her when she came back the September of fourth form with a bite scar on her neck from a Dead Hand.

Mother hadn’t been thrilled with either her _or_ Robb over that one. Still, it’s barely visible anymore, so no one minds it at home, and she has _some_ friends here still. Mostly it’s girls in her Magic classes, girls from Bain or the few who’ve come to school from home, but there’s Tilly and Elise from hockey, too, so it’s not so bad.

Even so - she won’t be sorry to see the back of Wyverley. She’s outgrown school, just as Robb and Dany warned her she would, and she’s outgrown Ancelstierre, just as Mother and Dad warned her she would. The only thing really keeping her here is Grandmother, and the fact that Arya, Bran, and Rickon are all still at school here.

Mostly Grandmother, since the others come home every summer and every Midwinter. Grandmother still refuses to visit the House, despite _years_ of wheedling and coaxing by Sansa and Robb, and even by Edmure.

Oh, and Aunt Lysa, and Robin and Alayne, and little Calista. She supposes they’re a reason to come back south, but they’re all stuck down in Corvere and Aunt Lysa only _summers_ as far north as Bain. Sansa loves her family, but not even her family will draw her so far south that she can’t feel the Charter - she’s heard enough from Edmure and Viserys about how horrible _that_ is.

Grandmother’s bangle, heavy and silver and wrapped around with her gold and white marriage ribbons, clanks gently against her watch as she ties off the ribbon in Sansa’s hair. It’s quiet then, Grandmother smoothing Sansa’s lapels and straightening her tie, looking just a little teary.

“You’re so like your mama, sweetheart,” she sighs. “Just… taller.”

Yes, Sansa is _too_ tall, as Grandmother loves to remind her. She’s as tall as Uncle Brandon, nearly as tall as Edmure, and while that’s excellent in combat it’s a nuisance in society. Grandmother cares a great deal more for Ancelstierran society than Sansa does, and society back home cares a great deal more for the keys on Sansa’s surcoat than they do for the length of her legs.

“So you’ve said, Grandmother,” she says, leaning down to kiss Grandmother’s cheek. “Come on, the others will be waiting for us at the school.”

Grandmother’s car is a tiny, rattly old thing, an ancient Marlin that chucks along the road to Wyverley at low speed and considerable volume, and Sansa is almost sad that this is the last time she’ll sit behind the wheel - even if she visits, she’ll be borrowing  a car from the Scouts to get from wherever the Crossing Point is to Bain, and she’ll ferry Grandmother around in that. She learned to drive in the Marlin, though, and borrowed it without permission more than once for slightly boozy stargazing sessions with her few friends on Saturday nights.

The school gates are thrown wide open when they arrive, decorated with black and white bunting and a huge banner, _Welcome parents and alumni,_ strung up over the ironwork. It’s sad, driving under it this last time, but not as sad as it ought to be. She’ll ask Robb how it was for him, leaving Somersby.

There’s a sleek black tank of a jeep parked not far away, with tinted windows and a diplomatic badge tucked between the rearview and the windscreen - the others have beaten them here, it seems. No one else’s parents arrive in combat vehicles, and no one else’s parents have diplomatic badges without any other adornments.

Robb clambers out as soon as the Marlin groans to a stop, opening Grandmother’s door and handing her up out of the car, accepting her fussing and fiddling with better grace than Sansa’s been able to muster all morning.

Mother and Dad come straight to Sansa, which is nice. Dad’s smiling, but trying to hide it, and Mother’s smile is tiny and a bit sideways, which means they have a surprise for her - maybe a new sword. She’d quite like a new sword.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Dad says, leaning in and kissing her cheek, whereas Mother just pulls her straight in for a fierce hug that leaves her ribs stinging. No one else here is openly affectionate the way Sansa is used to at home, which she sometimes thinks explains a great deal about why Ancelstierre is so bloody constipated as a country.

“All set?” Mother asks, nudging Sansa’s braid back over her shoulder with a knowing smile - Grandmother always plaits Sansa’s hair so it hangs attractively forward, but she’s spent too much time training to be _comfortable_ like that. She used do the same to Mother, apparently, and openly despairs of Arya keeping her hair bobbed, so it can’t be braided at all except flat to her head, which just isn’t _attractive._

“Just about,” Sansa says. “My trunk’s packed, and the last few bits are up in the dorm - are we flying from the Crossing Point?”

“Riding,” Mother says, nose wrinkling when Sansa can’t quite hide her displeasure. “Your granddad has a present for you at the Wayhouse, sweetheart, so no snippiness, thank you.”

“Granddad _always_ has presents for us, Mother,” Arya says, tucking herself under Sansa’s arm before any of them even noticed her approach. Immaculate in her newly-laundered uniform, Arya’s almost unrecognisable, but she _is_ pink in the face and she _does_ have her hockey stick in hand, which means she won’t be immaculate for much longer. “That’s not much of a bargaining chip, really.”

“How about, if you two don’t complain on the way to the Wayhouse, we won’t complain when Edmure and Benjen inevitably whisk the two of you away for a fortnight as soon as we get to the House?” Dad offers, and Sansa’s as pleased as ever to notice that he’s holding Mother’s hand. It’s something that never fails to unnerve her about the Ancelstierran parents who visit the school, that cool lack of affection that seems to alien to everything Sansa knows of marriage. It feels like coming home, just seeing Mother leaning in to nudge her shoulder to Dad’s.

“We’re going to give you three weeks each,” Mother says. “Belisaere and the Glacier for you, Sansa, and Edge and the Southerlands for you, Arya - although I do reserve the right to call Sansa home. Fair?”

“Supremely,” Sansa says, delighted by this unexpected boon. “Are you certain? I know-”

“Don’t tempt me,” Mother chides, grinning. “Now, come on, let’s meet these Ancelstierrans of yours, since my mother has made it _perfectly_ clear that she prefers my children to me-”

“Hello, Catelyn,” Grandmother says very pointedly, appearing on Robb’s arm before Mother can even turn her head. “How wonderful to have you on this side of the Wall.”

“Nice to see you too, Mummy,” Mother says cheerfully, with the same slighty panicked sort of smile that Sansa recognises from her own face, and Robb’s, when they’ve been caught out. “Have you done something new with your hair?”

Grandmother’s hair is almost equal parts black and snowy white, swept up into a fantastic storm atop her head and held in place by pearl- and diamond-headed hairpins - Grandfather sent them, so when the wind is blowing from the north, they shine gold with Charter marks. She hasn’t changed it once in Sansa’s lifetime, but she’s so vain of it that any compliment is enough to derail her before she can go on a rant.

Mother is claimed and tugged aside, leaving Robb with his hands in the pockets of his Ancelstierran pinstripe trousers and his Ancelstierran tinted sun-glasses perched on his nose. He looks so much like Edmure that it’s jarring, just for a moment, until he smiles - because he smiles just like Dad.

“How’s it feel, San?” he asks, rocking on his heels. “Ready to become who you truly are?”

She rolls her eyes - Granddad and Grandfather have both asked her that at least five times in the past year, and she remembers them asking Robb the same thing, during his final year at school. She is who she’s always been, it’s just her circumstances that are due to change. Her _surroundings._ Being at school south of the Wall has never kept her from being the Abhorsen’s daughter, the Wallmaker’s granddaughter, friend to a princess and to several Voices of the Nine Day Watch. It’s just delayed her stepping fully into being herself.

“I know, I know,” Robb says, still smiling even as he grabs Arya around the head despite her very vocal protests. “Dad and I have been sitting on Granddad all week, to make sure he doesn’t overwhelm you when we get to the Wayhouse. He’s very excited to have you there, even if it is only for a day or two.”

Sansa’s more excited than she’d like to admit, to be going to the Wayhouse - she’s missed all of her family, not just Mother’s side, and sometimes feels like she’s cheating during the school year. Grandmother is only up the road, and Edmure pops in whenever he’s passing - to equal parts delight and despair from her classmates, once she’d convinced them that the ribbons around his wrist really do mean he’s married, and yes, Theophania, to a _man_ \- but no Wallmaker except Dad has crossed the Wall in years, since even Jon was sent to school in Highbridge, specifically because his father wanted him at Somersby. She’s always got someone on hand from Mother’s side, but she only really sees any of Dad’s lot during the holidays-

Oh. Maybe she can get away with visiting Granddad more, now. Lyanna said in her last letter that he’s been getting grumpy and melancholy, which is probably code for lonely. Sansa doesn’t know how much help she’d be, but her presence couldn’t _hurt,_ could it?

“I’ll bet he has a sword for San,” Arya pipes up. “Bet you any money, Robb, Granddad has a sword with a sapphire pommel waiting for her.”

Granddad has given her a selection of knives worked with sapphires and blued steel over the past few years, and it _is_ tradition for every child of a Wallmaker to receive a sword upon finishing school, so this isn’t any sort of a wild guess on Arya’s part. It’s thrilling, though, to think of finally having a sword of her own, instead of whatever the sendings give her from the armoury.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Dad cautions, but he’s smiling, so she’s almost definitely getting a sword. “Now, remind me what’s expected of us at this ceremony of yours - it’s been donkey’s years since Lya’s, and I forgot.”

Lyanna would kill Dad for making her sound old like that, which has Arya grinning even as she wrestles herself out of the headlock Robb has somehow trapped her in. Mother is still being berated by Grandmother, looking fond but pained, so Sansa links her arm through Dad’s and heads for the doors.

“You and Mother have to sit with the other parents,” she tells him, pleased that he’s wearing a beautiful black suit and bow-tie, very fashionable, disturbed only by the Wallmaker gold sash cutting across his crisp white shirt under his jacket. Mother’s sash is Abhorsen blue, of course, and even Grandmother is wearing a blue petticoat, which is both fabulous and very daring. “Arya and Robb and Grandmother can cram in wherever, but you two have to sit up front.”

Had Sansa been Head Girl, they would’ve been sitting beside Headmistress Belmore, but there’s been a very marked distaste for _the northern girls_ in the past few years, so that was never an option. As it is, she made prefect, and she’s first in both Language Arts and Magic - that by a fair margin, too - so they’re still in the front row.

“And when do we jump up and down and scream like barbarians?” Dad asks, still smiling. “I hear it’s very important that we play our part, so that the Corolinists can feel better about calling us savages and bastards.”

 _“Dad,”_ she chides, because First Minister Spencer is right over there with Theophania. “You don’t get to do that until I’m on stage to accept my medals.”

She’s got hockey medals to collect as well, after all - it’s always been her best sport, if only because it feels sort of like polite melée fighting.

“Excellent,” Robb says, chasing them up the steps with Arya still under his arm. “Arya and I have a banner prepared and everything.”

 

* * *

 

The drive to the Wall is comfortable enough, because Sansa was given a chance to change into something a little less formal than her uniform before leaving the school - neat dark grey culottes, a sensible sky-blue blouse, and comfortable, practical shoes. She sits between Arya and Robb, behind Mother and Dad, and settles into the flow of the Charter, deepening with every mile further north they travel.

“What does Grandmother’s letter say, San?” Robb asks, lounging against the door with his eyes closed. She misses Rickon and Bran terribly for a moment, because they always take advantage of Robb dropping his guard like this, but contents herself with knowing they’ll be waiting at the Crossing Point, under strict guard by Edmure. “She didn’t seal it, I noticed, so you must be supposed to open it sooner rather than later.”

Sansa looks down at the letter Grandmother pressed into her hand right as she was leaving, and is surprised to find it isn’t addressed to her.

“It’s for Grandfather,” she says, stunned, and doesn’t resist when Mother reaches back and tugs it out of her hand to read it - Sansa has seen snippets of her grandparents’ twice-yearly exchanges, and she very much wishes there was a spell for removing memories. No one deserves to read about that kind of thing in their grandfather’s handwriting.

“The mean old bitch!” Mother shouts, startling Dad enough that he swerves a little. “Why couldn’t she tell _me_ about this, instead of lecturing me about how fat she thinks I’ve gotten since I had Rickon?”

“Tell you what, Mum?” Arya asks, heaving forward to lean over the back of Mother’s seat. “Is she disowning you? Is she disowning _me_ because I won’t grow out my hair?”

“She’s _coming to visit in August,”_ Mother hisses. “She’s not crossed the Wall in thirty years, and she’s crossing _now?_ Is she _dying?”_

“Mother!” Robb exclaims, simply because such an outburst is so unexpected of Mother.

“Well!” Mother exclaims right back. “I’m not wrong! I can’t imagine what else would drive her to visit - unless Dad is dying?” She seizes Dad’s wrist, which somehow does not make him swerve even a little, and shakes it. “Ned! Is Dad dying? Has he said anything to you?”

“I think it has rather more to do with Lysa moving back across the Wall,” Arya pipes up, which silences them all. “Robin told me, they’ve arranged it all via Edmure, they’ve got a house in Belisaere and everything.”

Mother rounds on Arya like a Greater Dead, terrible and halfways concussed with the surprise of all this.

“Why did Lysa not tell me this?” she demands, to which Arya shrugs. “Charter preserve us, is anyone telling me _anything?”_

“I proposed to Wyn last week,” Robb says, melting back as if trying to slide through the door. “Since you’re asking, Mother.”

Dad pulls over abruptly and stops the jeep.

“Everyone out!” he shouts. “I don’t like driving at the best of times, so all of you, out until we’ve got this out of our systems!”

“ _Ned-”_

“That means you, Cat,” Dad says firmly. “And this isn’t the children’s faults, so less shouting.”

Mother sticks her tongue out at Dad, but she climbs out nonetheless. She also heaves open the back door, digs a hockey stick out of the luggage, and marches over to the nearest tree to begin working out her frustration.

“She’ll be fine in a minute or two,” Dad says, climbing out himself and standing outside Robb’s open window - coincidentally, as far from Mother as possible, just now. “You know how she gets.”

Sansa’s never seen Mother quite so overwhelmed, but breaking a hockey stick - _Sansa’s_ hockey stick, well that’s just wonderful - against a tree seems to help.

“This family,” Mother announces, returning like a conquering hero and leaning in Arya’s window, “has a very serious problem in terms of communication.”

Not untrue, Sansa has to admit - she had no idea that Aunt Lysa was thinking of moving home, and she was talking to her only two weeks ago, right after the school year ended in Corvere, when they were all at Grandmother’s for Sunday lunch. She also had no idea Grandmother was thinking of visiting, and she’s spent most of the past two days with Grandmother. She _also_ had no idea Robb was even thinking of proposing to Wyn, although that one is a lot less surprising, now she thinks about it.

“Why is Lysa moving home, anyway?” Dad asks. “She _loves_ Ancelstierre.”

Dad very politely loathes Mother’s sister, just as he tolerates but is generally baffled by Edmure. If he didn’t love Mother so much, and get on so well with Grandfather, he’d never survive living at the House. Even so, he isn’t wrong - Sansa can’t imagine Lysa in the Old Kingdom, with her Charter mark glowing and keys stitched into her hems. After her first husband died, she married a wealthy half-Ancelstierran merchant who took up a post as bursar to the consul in Bain, and then ended up as trade attaché at the embassy in Corvere, and they fit into Ancelstierran society in a way that no one else in the family ever has, even Grandmother - and she _is_ Ancelstierran.

Lysa has split her time between the Bain and Corvere for years, since Grandmother is in Bain and both Alayne and Robin were at school up north, and she can’t go a full conversation without spitting absolute venom about home. Sansa can’t imagine that she’s happy about this move, which means it must be by her husband’s choice. Sansa’s never met Petyr, but Lysa’s absolutely dotty about him, and she’d do _anything_ for him.

“Bloody bastard,” Mother grumbles. “Alright, I’ll keep calm until we run into something Dead so I can _really_ vent my frustrations, which means we aren’t allowed to discuss any theories as to why Mummy is visiting or why Lysa is moving home. Understood?”

“She’s moving home because Alayne is marrying Derick Oren,” Robb says, “and because Robin’s chest has gotten worse, and there’s nothing the doctors in Ancelstierre can do for him. And because she’s found out that Petyr’s money is less from trade and more from the whorehouses he runs in Belisaere and Corvere.”

Mother’s jaw drops so sharply it clicks, and Sansa’s isn’t far behind.

“Well,” says Dad. “This _has_ been an interesting chat, but I’d rather not discuss-”

“Whorehouses!” Mother shouts. “He’s a _procurer?!_ And he thought he was good enough to marry the niece of an Abhorsen? I’ll flay him-”

“Ahem,” Dad says. “What was that about remaining calm, Cat?”

“I am calm,” Mother says. “I’m just _disgusted.”_

Petyr grew up with Mother and the rest, Sansa suddenly remembers - his father was killed fighting some kind of Greater Dead near Nestowe, with Uncle Bryn, and Grandfather took him in as a fosterling as reward, or penance.

“That doesn’t sound very calm, love,” Dad sighs, but he also gets back into the jeep and starts the engine. Mother gets back in as well, crossing her arms and fuming so hard Sansa can almost see the steam rising from her. “And we were having such a nice day.”

“Any other secrets, Robb? Arya?” Mother asks. “Jon and Wylla haven’t eloped, have they? Prince Aegon hasn’t written to ask for your hand in marriage, has he, Arya?”

“No to both,” Arya says, “but there _is_ a letter from Belisaere waiting for me at the House, according to Grandfather’s last letter.”

All things considered, Arya could have timed that particular revelation a little better.

 

* * *

 

Edmure is sitting on the bonnet of a jeep in the blue dusk light when they finally arrive at the Crossing Point, all five cranky and exhausted. He springs up as soon as they draw to a halt, striding across the concrete to throw open Mother’s door, and-

“Did you know about Lysa moving home, Cat?” he demands. “Because I always thought she’d rather shoot herself in the head than cross the Wall again, but apparently I know nothing.”

Arya shrugs in a bafflement equalled only by Sansa’s own at this revelation that Robin was wrong, and that Edmure has nothing to do with this transplant of Abhorsens back north of the Wall. Something about it is putting a nasty feeling in Sansa’s stomach, but she gets rather distracted by the furious looks on Mother and Edmure’s faces, just then, and forgets to be worried.

They disappear off to have a very determined conversation, leaving Sansa and the others with the luggage - which is, admittedly, all Sansa and Arya’s, but that’s not the point. Edmure didn’t even say hello, is the point, which means this whole thing with Lysa is going to ruin the whole summer, probably. At least Arya’ll be leaving with Benjen, who won’t give a toss either way about Mother’s sister, but Sansa’s depending on Edmure to get her to Belisaere so she and Dany can go to the Glacier, and she’ll be stranded if he’s caught up in family intrigue.

“And Alayne told me that Ed was in on this whole thing, according to Lysa. Oh well. If this spills over,” Robb says quietly, heaving her trunk up and balancing it on his shoulder, “I’ll get you to Belisaere, provided you don’t mind a stopover at Holehallow.”

“How bad is it going to be?” Arya asks, her enormous kit bag hanging from one arm and Sansa’s violin case in the other hand. “Realistically speaking, how buggered are the holidays because of this?”

“Probably not that badly, once they burn themselves out,” Robb says reasonably. “But they’ll both be in foul humour for a few days, because Lysa’s been an absolute beast since Edmure got married, from what I’ve gathered.”

“Lysa’s always been a beast,” Dad says, uncharacteristically catty. “She never wanted to come home in the first place, and when she did, she got herself embroiled in a scandal and blamed everyone else, especially your grandfather.”

Lysa _does_ tend to speak poorly of Grandfather, true enough - although never where Grandmother might hear. Sansa’s never really given it much thought, because she only sees Lysa a couple of times a year, and Alayne is Robb’s age and Robin is Arya’s and Calista’s more or less a baby, so she’s never been close to any of them. She doesn’t know Lysa the way she does Dad’s crew, and certainly not as well as she knows Edmure, so she’s never thought to _care_ about why Lysa hates crossing the Wall so much.

“There’ve been rumours about Petyr for years,” Dad says. “He’s always been a little… Odd, I suppose, and he made a fortune out of nowhere, and no one knew how. It isn’t exactly a _surprise_ that he’s a whoremonger, so I’m guessing Lysa’s got more reason than just that for leaving him.”

“Alayne and Robin needing to move back to the Kingdom is probably a big factor,” Robb says, shrugging. “Petyr being a procurer, and the talk that he’s losing his post as trade attaché-”

“Did Edmure tell you that?” Dad asks. “Charter, Robb, where are you hearing these things?”

“Wyn,” Robb says. “Her uncle, Wendel, he’s being tipped as Petyr’s replacement in the Embassy.”

“Robin is also set to inherit some of his father’s title and holdings,” Arya offers. “He can access them when he turns fifteen, and some of the money.  That might be helping, I think.”

Dad sighs. He saves that particular put-upon sigh for when Lyanna wheedles around him to talk to Jon’s father on her behalf, or when unwanted visitors persist and visit the House anyway.

“It always comes down to money with Lysa,” he grouses. “Money and titles. She’s always been jealous of your mother being the Abhorsen. Having the House.”

“Having a titled husband,” Sansa says. “She likes you about as much as you like her, Dad, believe me.”

“Good,” Dad says. “I’ve worked hard to make sure she knows I don’t approve of her carrying on, I’d feel like I’d failed if she liked me.”

Robb sighs, tucking his sun-glasses into his jacket pocket and tugging his tie off.

“How about,” he says, “we go find Bran and Rickon, and we let Mum and Ed shout themselves hoarse about Lysa while we sort dinner? There’s nothing we can really _do_ about Lysa, aside from go to Alayne’s wedding and offer Grandfather to Robin if Lysa gets greedy.”

“I think your mother is planning on skewering Petyr, so we can also make sure that doesn’t happen,” Dad says. “Go on, get inside, get dinner - I’ll be along as soon as I can shepherd these two.”

“You’re suspiciously calm about all of this, Dad,” Arya says. “How are you managing that?”

“Arya, beloved second daughter,” Dad says, taking Arya by the shoulders and looking very firmly into her eyes, barely holding back laughter. “My sister was tricked into running away with the very, very married Crown Prince, and because of that, my father was almost burned to death. Her illegitimate son is now marrying into the richest family in the Old Kingdom. Your mother’s family drama is _nothing_ compared to mine.”

 

* * *

 

Bran is tinkering with something when they eventually find him and Rickon, something that glows golden-green in his cupped hands, something he refuses to let Robb see.

He lets Sansa and Arya see, though, and Arya coos at the sight of the delicate gold-and-jade flowers Bran’s made, shining with elegantly drawn Charter marks and threads of some silvery metal that catch the light like raindrops.

“They’re like beacons,” he says, while Rickon is leaping down onto Robb from the top of a chest of drawers. “One for Robb, one for Wyn - you know how she worries about him when he’s out with Mother. They’ll shine so long as they’re both alive, and the petals stop shining one by one if either of them is injured.”

“That’s… Have you made one for Mother and Dad?” Sansa asks, because Dad gets panicky as soon as Mother misses a single every-other-daily message hawk, and this might go some way toward calming him down. “I think they’d appreciate it.”

“I enchanted their watches,” Bran says. “The hands will fall off if either dies.”

“Clever,” Arya says. “They’re never without their watches.”

“How do they _work_ , Bran?” Sansa presses. “What powers them?”

“Oh, I never know how these things work,” Bran says cheerfully. “I just start pulling marks from the Charter and it works, usually.”

“Usually?”

“Sometimes it blows up,” he admits, not looking even a little perturbed. “But we’ve gotten very good at containing fires, since- well, you know.”

Since Granny, and that last foundry fire. Ah.

“Alright, alright,” Robb says, dumping Rickon down between Sansa and Arya and leaning his crossed arms on Rickon’s tangled hair. “Now that you’ve had your secrets, can we please take a moment to decide what we’re having for dinner?”

Rickon wraps his arms around Sansa’s waist, seeming happy enough to simply hold onto all of them like this, and sighs.

“I would like,” he says, “chips. And for Mother to stop shouting - it’s annoying the Scouts.”

“I think we can arrange for some chips, Rick,” Robb says. “As for Mother, well, Dad said he’d settle her down, so. We’ll see how we get on by tomorrow morning.”

“Mother has settled herself down quite nicely, thank you all very much,” Mother says, striding through the door with Dad and Edmure on her heels. “Charter, this family! We’ve sent a letter to Lysa to demand an explanation, and we’ve sent a hawk on to Dad to give him a little warning about all of this, and that’s all I can really do for now.”

Sansa has her doubts that a hawk will be enough forewarning for Grandfather, but she says nothing. It wouldn’t do to set Mother off again before they’ve even had dinner.

 

* * *

 

Crossing the Wall is a homecoming all of its own, flooding them with warmth of the Charter like stepping down into a bath. Sansa always forgets quite how thinly stretched her bond with the Charter is in Ancelstierre until she’s back in the Borderlands, with solid, well-made boots on her feet and her panpipes on her hip. Arya breathes a noisy sigh of relief when they step into the cool early spring sunlight, and Robb’s shoulders drop just an inch or so, resting easy.

“Charter, it’s like a good belch after a heavy meal,” Edmure says, breaking the tone of the moment as only he can. “Where’re the Paperwings, then?”

“We’re not flying, Ed,” Mother says, coming through with Rickon under her arm. “We’re riding. Come along. Much to be done.”

Dad helps Bran into his chair, and Bran gives a cheery sort of huff as the marks spelled into the seat ease the pains in his back and legs. He looks so much more his age when he’s not bundled up with pain, trapped in the horrible mechanical chair that he’s limited to in Ancelstierre.  It’s an adaptable thing, his real chair, and it’ll get him to the horse and into his saddle, and then it will pack itself up neat as a ninepence.

Bran made it himself. He’s _very_ good. It’s going to be a difficult one, deciding whether he or Jon takes the Wayhouse, when the time comes.

Sansa’s never been one for riding - she prefers flying, or sailing - but she’s relieved all the same to see that Mother and Dad have arranged for their horses to be brought from the Wayhouse. Whisper is a long-legged beauty of a chestnut, taller than Arya’s Crimson by two full hands, and she’s the only horse Sansa doesn’t mind riding.

She’s also a source of ridicule for Sansa, because she came as a gift from the children of the Quartermaster of the Glacier. Sansa made friends when she bound that Stilken, and she’s kept them, but because of Edmure telling everyone who’d listen about that stupid Seeing of Sansa handfasting with a Clayr, everything she has that’s come from the Glacier is mocked as a _courting gift._

“Hello, sweetling,” she cooes, letting Whisper sniff at her hands and get used to her again. “How have _you_ been?”

Whisper knickers and noses at her pockets, looking for apples. That’s as much greeting as she’s like to get, so she produces the desired apple and leaves Whisper to it, turning to reach for her saddle.

Dad is standing behind her.

“About this horse,” he says, and Sansa sighs. “No, hear me out - is she _really_ a courting gift?”

“We’ve talked about this, Dad,” she says, as firmly and politely as she can. “It isn’t-”

“It’s just that there’s a stack of letters a foot thick waiting for you back at the House, sweetheart, and not all of them are from your friends Margaery and Daenerys.”

“I imagine some of them are from Arianne, or Oberyn,” Sansa says. “Or from Prince Viserys, wanting to annoy Edmure about something, or from one of the Manderlys - I keep up an enormous amount of correspondence, Dad, I always have-”

“Some of them are from the Glacier, sealed with a Library stamp,” Dad cuts in. “I get some from time to time, from the Chief Librarian - research requests, things like that. I know the seal. No one under a First Assistant Librarian is allowed to use it, and I’ve made some enquiries. Sansa-”

“He’s just a friend,” she says, ignoring the colour and heat flooding up her neck. “He’s Margaery’s brother, Dad, and _just a friend._ ”

She hasn’t time for anything more than friends, no matter what Mother and Dad think. She’s been at school for the past nine months, thanks, and when she _is_ home, she’s tied up in training and work with Mother and Robb, and she really _does_ have an awful lot of correspondence to keep up with, and then there’s her research, and-

There is no time for courting. No matter how beautifully Willas’ hair curls at his nape when he’s bent over his research. He’s the better part of ten years older than her, anyway, and probably has a whole slew of pretty, slender lovers in the Glacier.

Anyway.

“If you say so,” Dad says. “But be aware that I used say the same thing about your mother, when she’d send letters to me at the Wayhouse.”

 

* * *

 

By the time the Charter-speckled smoke of the foundry tower comes into view, Sansa’s arse is so sore that she isn’t sure she’ll be able to walk. Arya gives a tired cheer, echoed by Bran and Rickon, and even Dad’s shoulders slump in relief.

“About bloody time,” Edmure says. “Why in the world did they have to put the bloody Crossing Point so far west this time?”

“Do _you_ want to ask the Scouts to disobey the Clayr?” Mother asks, nudging her horse up alongside Dad’s, at the head of the column. “I don’t think I’d dare. You _know_ how they feel about the Clayr.”

The Scouts _adore_ the Clayr, for reasons unknown - they really should have a fantastic adoration for the Abhorsen, all things considered, but the Clayr tell them when and where to move the Crossing Point, and that’s forged some kind of near-religious fascination between the Wall and the Glacier. The Clayr are baffled by it, from what Sansa’s gathered, but they lean into it all the same. People are always worshipping them, the seeing-witches of the northern mountains, and the death-witches of the high plains can’t compete with that.

“Nearly there,” Robb says bracingly, the only one of them not knackered by the better part of a week spent in the saddle. “Just think, San - hot bath, no smell of sulphur, and the sendings are only a little batty instead of completely mad.”

“Thank the Charter,” Bran says fervently. “Blister salve. I can hear it singing to me.”

“And _real food,_ ” Rickon agrees. “Oh, do you think Brandon will have made sausages? He puts all those spices into them, and those chips Lya makes-”

“And Granddad’s cinnamon cakes,” Arya says, to universal approval. “How far out are we, Dad?”

“An hour at most,” he says, which rouses them to another cheer. “Come on, buck up, everyone, we’ve got somewhere to be.”

The rest of the ride passes mostly in silence, except for Rickon’s occasional attempt at song, ruined only by the way his voice can’t handle the high notes anymore. It’s not really starting to break, not yet, but it’s heading that way and he’s not even slightly self-conscious about it, which is a joy. Bran still blushes the rare time his voice cracks, and Robb did his best never to speak in front of any of them while _he_ was going through puberty. That probably wasn’t helped by how Jon had just woken up one morning suddenly sounding like Dad. Still, it had been a touch extreme, even by Robb’s ever-dramatic standards.

It’s just tipping toward evening when they ride under the massive arched gateway and into the front courtyard, and Granddad is waiting for them. He’s surrounded by sendings, who step forward to take the horses as soon as everyone dismounts, and then there are more sendings, and they have warm, damp towels, and heavy cloaks to wrap over their shoulders against the growing chill.

“Welcome home, children,” Granddad says, ruffling Bran’s hair and smoothing Rickon’s as they pass him, clapping Robb on the shoulder and kissing Dad’s cheek. Mother gets a kiss, too, on the brow, and Sansa and Arya are then gathered into Granddad’s barrel of a chest and showered with more kisses - Granddad has never been subtle about their being his favourites. “How was school? Have you all planned your summers well?”

“Dad,” Dad warns. “Not yet. Let them have their dinners and baths, and then you can lecture them about what they’re doing with their lives.”

“Abhorsening,” Robb calls back.

“Wallmaking,” Bran agrees. Rickon shouts something that sounds vaguely like _hellraising,_ but Dad’s not likely to like that, so Sansa pretends she didn’t hear it.

“Alright, girls,” Granddad says. “Since your brothers are determined to be flippant, let’s agree now that you two will sit with me at dinner, shall we?”

 

* * *

 

Sansa’s braiding Arya’s hair - it’s barely long enough for it, but she does look so fetching with her hair gathered away from her face - when the door of their shared room is kicked open to reveal Aunt Lyanna.

Arya’s the image of Lya, if a little taller, but Lyanna’s hair is a constant tangle that trails halfway down her back, and Sansa can’t remember ever seeing her without soot stains on her face and hands, even at Granny’s Farewell. Even now, with that mass of hair wet from the bath, there are smuts of dirt on Lya’s cheeks and all up her forearms.

“Girls!” she cries. “Oh, wonderful! How are you both? Marvellous. I’m delighted.”

“Good to see you too, Lya,” Arya says wryly. “How’ve things been since we were home for Midwinter?”

“Well,” Lya says, launching into one of her effusive, rambling stories. Sansa listens with half an ear, picking up that Brandon’s gotten more reckless with Granny gone, and that Granddad is refusing to admit quite how deeply he’s still grieving, even after all these years. Ben hasn’t been home since last Midsummer, when Rickon blew up the brazier in the clock tower and Ben carried him out of the blaze, but that doesn’t seem to worry Lya as much as it should.

Sansa also picks up that Lya isn’t thrilled by Jon’s recent engagement.

“Ribbons as green as that girl’s hair,” Lya huffs, sprawled across Arya’s bed, under the skylight. “Honestly, I don’t see why he couldn’t settle for the Karstark girl, or that nice Glover girl-”

“Like you settled for one of the wealthiest men in the country, Lya, back in your day” Arya says. “Oh, wait, never mind.”

Sansa tucks the ends of Arya’s hair in while Lya slowly sits up to scowl at them. It’s a sensitive subject for her still, even though everyone else has moved on to newer scandals, and she takes morbid offence to anyone daring to mention it. Only Arya ever does, in Lya’s hearing.

“On that note,” Sansa says, glad she did her own hair before she went for Arya’s, “I think it’s time for dinner.”

They get to the dining hall in stormy silence, and Sansa gratefully settles in beside Granddad, who’s looking thoughtfully up at the vaulted, Charter-bright ceiling above.

“You know, poppet,” he says, “you don’t _have_ to go Abhorsening with your mother. We have a place for you here.”

“Or I could go Abhorsening with Mother,” Sansa chides. “Granddad, we’ve talked about this. You know I don’t-”

“I know,” he says. “But the offer is there, Sansa. We _always_ have a place for you here.”

And he means it, too - Sansa’s never once worn Wallmaker yellow since she bound the Stilken, but Granddad has never failed to remind her that she’s half a Wallmaker, even if she doesn’t feel it.

“Alright,” Brandon shouts down the table. “Who do we have for the holidays, and who’s buggering off to play silly beggars with an uncle?”

“You’ve got me,” Bran shouts back. “And Rickon, and Robb’s going to play silly beggars but since you won’t leave the foundry tower, he’s short an uncle.”

“So we’re losing the smart children and keeping the fool ones,” Brandon sighs. “Typical. Where are you going, girls?”

“Borderlands patrol with the Guards,” Arya says around a mouthful of sausage. “And Sansa’s going to break hearts at the Glacier, or in Belisaere - wherever there are more eligible young Clayr.”

“There’ll be no heartbreaking so long as I’m around to guard her,” Edmure says firmly. “Pass the butter, Rickon, there’s a good chap.”

Dad seems to approve of this, despite his earlier doubt of Sansa’s dismissals, but Mother looks more thoughtful than Sansa likes. She’s looked more thoughtful than Sansa would like every time the Clayr or heartbreaking have been mentioned this past year or so, and Sansa has a horrible feeling it’s something to do with those heavy letters Mother’s been getting stamped with the seal of the Glacier’s guards - Grandfather is a wonderful spy.

Sansa doesn’t like it when Mother looks thoughtful like that, though. She looks the same kind thoughtful when discussions about Robb’s potential - well, coming, now - wedding come up, and that makes Sansa nervous in ways she can’t quite explain.

 

* * *

 

Granddad is already in the foundry tower when Sansa finishes her breakfast the next morning, so she dons her heavy apron and finds her yellow-lensed goggles and forges on into the smoke to find him.

“Lyanna says you’ve been horribly grumpy,” she shouts over the crackling sparks thrown up by whatever he’s working on. “Feel like talking about it?”

He rounds on her with a spiralling cluster of marks glowing in one hand, and a spinning ball of molten metal in the other - his finesse with magic never fails to astonish her.

“Sansa,” he says. “I love you very much, pet, but I _never_ wish to talk about my feelings, and you know it.”

“I do,” she agrees. “Just thought I should make the offer. What are you working on?”

“New wheels for Bran’s chair,” he says, siphoning the metal into a mould and tossing the marks down over it. Now that the sparks and smoke have cleared, she can see the shape of it all, the angles and supporting cross-spokes, the way the marks sink in and create hinges where there should only be solid steel. “He said the ones he has aren’t maneuverable enough, but I’m a better smith than him.”

“And a more reliable smith than Brandon,” she agrees. “Granddad. Come on.”

He sighs, old in a way that makes Sansa’s chest ache, and sits on the edge of his workbench. She sits beside him, tugging his arm around her shoulders and huddling against the soft, thick leather of his apron. His widow’s ribbons seem heavy on his wrist, the blue-and-white matching the threadwork of veins below his thumb, and his familiar smell of soft smoke and gentle magic feels just a little fainter than usual.

“I blew out my knee after Midwinter,” he says. “Lyanna helped me build a new one - Brandon did the metal work, so of course I had to redo it as soon as I was upright again - but it set me to thinking, pet.”

“You’re retiring?”

“Considering it,” he admits. “I’m an old man, Sansa. My time as Wallmaker is coming to an end - I have one limb that’s entirely my own, now. I’ve a Charter-spelled chain round my ribs to keep my lungs clear, and a false eye. I’d like to live to see a great-grandchild, but that won’t happen if I keep on here.”

“Have you talked to Bran about it?”

“He’s not the only one that could take my place. There’s Jon, too.”

“But not Dad or Lya or Brandon?”

She isn’t surprised - Dad doesn’t belong at the Wayhouse anymore, Lyanna’s too headstrong, and Brandon just isn’t reliable enough. So Jon, or Bran, the only ones who are real _Wallmakers,_ in a way Sansa or Robb could never be, in a way Arya doesn’t want to be, and in a way Rickon hasn’t shown to be.

“It’ll be Bran,” Granddad admits. “But Jon’ll tide the Wayhouse over, until Bran’s finished with school and whatever other adventures he wants to take before settling in.”

Bran mostly wants to visit libraries and foundries around the Kingdom, as far as Sansa can tell, but she knows that isn’t entirely what Granddad means. She knows he’s expecting Bran to pick between Meera and Shireen - Shireen, for preference, given their history with the Baratheons, and how far a new marriage would go toward finally smoothing all that mess over - and he wants Bran to have time to have a normal life as a husband, as a father, before he has to give himself to the Wayhouse. Granddad became Wallmaker within two months of marrying Granny, and he’s always regretted that they didn’t have time to be _normal._

No one ever does, with trowels or keys or stars or towers on their shield. But Granddad wants that for Bran, has always wanted it for all of them, and Sansa feels like crying for him now.

“We’ll figure it out,” she promises. “Jon and Wylla will be on honeymoon until Midwinter, and then we can figure it all out. We’ll manage.”

It’s quiet but for the belching of the foundries, and then Granddad stands up as abruptly as he can on his newest leg. He rubs at his face, and Sansa does the polite thing and looks anywhere but at him while he settles himself.

“Oh,” he says. “I almost forgot - I have a surprise for you.”

It’s a sword with sapphire-eyed keys set in the crossguard.

 

* * *

 

Robb sends her a note via sending the next morning, asking her to meet him on the Paperwing platform - she’s surprised, because they’re not due to leave for the House until the day after tomorrow, and Ed’s made it abundantly clear that he’s going to fly her to the Glacier from the House, so she’s not sure why Robb feels the need to make a counteroffer. Particularly since his counteroffer includes a detour to Holehallow.

And then she sees the bells.

“Business, not pleasure,” he concedes with a frown. “We’ve had a hawk from Holehallow, San - the sendings are bringing your things, Mother’s already cleared us to go. I know you wanted to go with Edmure, but-”

“What do they think we have?” she asks, cutting over his waffling. If there’s work to be done at Holehallow, she’ll do it, and Dany will just have to wait an extra day or two.

“Nothing much,” he says. “A few Hands, maybe a Mordaut is what Mother thinks.”

She accepts the beautifully set pack from the sending who appeared while she wasn’t looking, only bothering to secure her sword belt and her pipe-pouch before throwing the rest into the Paperwing. Mother and Dad and Granddad all appear then, and Edmure is trailing them with wild hair and squinty eyes.

Ah. A late one, then. Brandon seems to cause a horrific hangover in poor Ed every time he visits.

“Be careful,” Mother says, kissing each of them on the cheek. “If there are Shadow Hands, it’s more likely to be a necromancer than wild magic. Sansa, listen to Robb. Robb, don’t forget your sister is with you. Work together.”

“Don’t get stabbed,” Dad says. “Or ensorcelled, or burned, or anything else that you’ll have to explain to us when you get to the House.”

Grandad says nothing, smiling fondly at Dad, and passes over a new bracer for Robb’s bell arm, and a new pair of gloves to Sansa. He never says goodbye, for fear of being the last, but he does lift Sansa’s hand to press a kiss to her knuckles.

“Bring these,” he says, passing her a little bag with his own seal on it. “They’re for Jon’s Wylla, from me - welcoming her to the family.”

The look he gives Robb could curdle milk, and Robb’s entire head seems to go bright red in retaliation.

“Once you actually _tell me_ about your Manderly, I’ll welcome her to the family too,” Granddad says. “But until then, I’ll just have to be fond of her from a distance.”

Granddad then passes her a little box with Bran’s seal of quartered bells and keys set across the join of the lid.

“This is for the elder Miss Manderly,” he says. “Bran obviously knows something I don’t, because he said it’s to welcome _her_ to the family. But I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.”

Robb gets redder, if possible, and ducks his head sheepishly until Granddad retreats, trailed by two sendings and Dad, who waves back over his shoulder.

“I’ll meet you at the House,” Edmure says, cringing back from the sun. “Be there soon, or my beloved husband is likely to fly south to herd me back to Belisaere, and he’s _insufferable_ when he gets to chide me for being late.”

“You adore him,” Sansa says, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “I’ll see you at the House as soon as I can, alright? Don’t fret. We’ll be fine.”

She and Robb have done this a dozen times before - well, maybe not a dozen, but they’ve done it before. They know how to work together, but Mother and Dad still worry, and Edmure still blames himself for her being involved in the family business at all, since he was the one who brought her to the Glacier just in time to meet the Stilken.

“We’ll manage,” Robb says, chucking his pack into the Paperwing with Sansa’s and whistling a low apology to the plane when it rustles in annoyance at the rough handling. “Come on, San, places to go, people to see.”

“Packages to deliver,” Sansa agrees. “We’ll see you at the House as soon as we’re done at Holehallow.”

Robb’s the best Paperwing pilot short of Edmure in the family, so Sansa settles into the hammock without much concern - although she _does_ hum along with Robb’s whistling, because she’s the best weather-worker in the family and Robb’s one failing as a pilot is his rising winds.

 

* * *

 

 

Holehallow is one of Sansa’s least favourite places in the whole of the Old Kingdom, because the soft, quiet sense of Death that pervades the very air of the town sets her teeth on edge.

Robb doesn’t seem to mind. He’s fond of Holehallow in the same way Mother is fond of the Wayhouse, or Edmure is fond of Belisaere, which is to say he doesn’t like it very much, but there’s something that makes it very much worth the visit.

Robb’s something is nearly as tall as Sansa, but narrower through the shoulder, and always wears her long hair in a pair of braids that reach well down past her elbows. Wynafryd makes a spirited attempt at dragging Robb bodily from the cockpit as soon as the Paperwing touches down, and Sansa is glad, for the thousandth time, that Robb and Jon are tied to the Manderly sisters, so she’s in no danger of their enthusiastic brand of courtship.

“Hello, Fred,” she says wearily, shouldering both her own pack and Robb’s and soldiering on past Robb and Fred’s greeting. It’s not been two months since they saw one another, per Robb, but the way they’re eating one another’s faces makes it seem as if they’ve been apart a lifetime. Sansa knows from experience to leave them to it, and heads in for the cover of the hangar. The wind is colder than it should be, and that has her shoulders tensing more even than the stale hint of Death she can taste right on the tip of her tongue.

Jon’s Wylla is waiting for her in the hangar, looking long-suffering as she eyes Robb and Fred with fond distaste. Her hair, green as grass from the backsplash of a miscast dye spell, glows slightly in the muted light, and she holds her arms out for a hug as soon as Sansa’s within reach. Sansa loves Wylla - maybe a little more than she does Fred, even if that makes her feel a touch disloyal - and goes willingly into her hold, throwing Robb’s pack down like an afterthought and tugging Wylla in close.

“Why are you taller every time I see you?” Wylla complains from somewhere around Sansa’s bosom. “Goodness me, you Abhorsens and your damnable legs - I’m so glad Jon’s all Wallmaker in that regard.”

“It’s nice to see you too, Wylla,” Sansa says, grinning and rolling her eyes as she gathers Robb’s pack up again. “We’re told there’s trouble?”

Wylla pulls a face of spectacular distaste at that, and Sansa can’t quite swallow down laughter. She and Jon make an odd pair, Jon so quiet and taciturn and Wylla so… _so,_ but they adore one another and have done for years, so Sansa supposes it must work.

They remind her of Mother and Dad, a little bit.

“From what we’ve been told, we think it’s one of those nasty little bastards that rides a host,” Wylla says. “Mordot? Mordun. I can’t remember.”

“Mordaut,” Sansa says. “They’re easily dealt with, and not like to cause as much harm as you’d think - how bad has it been?”

Wylla takes Robb’s pack - he and Fred are still saying hello - and guides Sansa toward the gorgeous New Castle the Manderlys built when they were given stewardship of Holehallow by the Abhorsens and the Wallmakers. Oh, the royal family are the only ones buried in the shipyard, true enough, but it isn’t _theirs._ The Wallmakers built it and the Abhorsens keep it, and the Manderlys watch over it all with a wary scepticism that comes from their southerling ancestry.

The New Castle is the last building before the boundary that keeps everyone away from the sinkhole, and it stands as beautiful as it does proud, all sweeping lines and shining granite facing. The Manderlys are far and away the wealthiest family in the Old Kingdom, and it shows in every detail of their home, and in the town below - what was once a silent plain has become the most fashionable town in the country, and the Manderlys are the ones who made it so.

Sansa should love it. But her wisdom teeth ache constantly with the cold of Death, and she just can’t.

“We’ve four dead on the sandstone face,” Wylla says, waving off an eager sending and nudging Sansa toward a transport - one of Jon’s gifts to Wylla, using similar magic to that of a Paperwing but applying it to wheels instead of winds - and whistling to set them on their way, once the packs are stowed in the back. “And two more in the town - one in the tanneries, the other in the smithyards.”

“Anything to tie all of them together?” Sansa asks. “They’ll have to have come across one another at some point, else the Mordaut couldn’t have jumped hosts. What condition were the dead found in?”

“I wasn’t allowed to view them personally,” Wylla admits. “But I hear they were sort of… sucked clean. Nothing but fat and bone left.”

Sansa thinks hard, pages from the Book of the Dead flashing through her mind, and her stomach sinks.

“Then it isn’t a Mordaut we’re dealing with,” she says.

“No?” Wylla doesn’t take her eyes off the smooth-paved lane that leads from the Paperwing hangar to the castle, but she does cast a worried glance sidelong at Sansa. Sansa knows that look - she sees it every time she goes out with Mother or Robb, and ends up facing a great deal more than the handful of Gore Crows that was reported.

“No,” she says. “It’s something _much_ worse.”

 

* * *

 

Something worse than a Mordaut could be many things, and pages and pages of the Book roll through her head as she works through the mounting evidence.

The bodies of the dead have been preserved, kept on ice until an Abhorsen could see them and identify the beast that killed them. Sansa’s had half an hour with them by the time Robb staggers in, windswept and Wynafryd-swept.

“Shadow Hands,” she says, marking notes in the little commonplace book she found in the front pocket of her pack. “At least, it’s Shadow Hands doing the killing, I can’t speak for who or what might be behind them.”

Robb runs the backs of his fingers over the waxy, distorted skin, his face troubled, and nods.

“We’ll deal with the Shadow Hands first,” he says, “and hope that they draw out their master. We must assume that there will be some Dead Hands as well, I’m afraid, so if you take them, I can focus on the Shadow Hands - you know they react better to the bells.”

“I do,” Sansa agrees. “But what I don’t know is what we’re to do if a necromancer appears.”

Robb’s face is still troubled, his fingers lingering on the face of the tanner’s lad laid out for their perusal. Sansa will say the final rites over these poor souls herself, once they’ve done their duty and put the Dead down.

“Mother has a theory,” he says, after a long quietness. “Do you remember your first visit to the Glacier, San?”

“I bound a Stilken, Robb,” she says. “I’m hardly likely to forget it.”

“The Bursar’s brother was killed over their Charter Stone,” he says. “And Mother went to help Queen Dowager Rhaella repair it. Do you remember that?”

Sansa remembers that well enough. Mother left the House two days after she arrived from the Glacier, and Dany had written _reams_ complaining about the unfairness of being left in Belisaere with the King and his family. It had been unusual in and of itself for the Queen Dowager to venture forth from the capital, and stranger still for her to participate in such a ritual as the repair of a Charter Stone.

It didn’t do to highlight quite how strongly her royal blood ran. While the blood of any Charter mage could break a Stone, it was only the blood of a member of the royal family that could heal it. Queen Dowager Rhaella’s blood was exactly as royal as her long-dead husband’s had been, if the rumours were to be believed.

“Mother says there were signs even then that there was something more to it than just a necromancer with high ambitions,” Robb says. “That it was important that it was the Bursar’s brother that was slaughtered, and that he was killed right as you and Edmure arrived. The Queen Dowager thought the same, so she charged the Queen’s brother with researching… Certain things in the Clayr’s Library.”

“What kind of things?”

Robb squirms, and looks her squarely in the eye.

“Greater Dead things,” he says. “Of the sort bound in the waterfall, but worse. She thinks it was a Wallmaker, as Kerrigor and the Conqueror were royal, or Chlorr of the Mask was an Abhorsen. We don’t know, but the way it's been working-”

“This has been ongoing?” Sansa cuts in. “There have been more deaths at the Glacier? Why did no one say anything!”

“Because there haven’t been more deaths in the Glacier, Sansa,” Robb says. “Well, not specifically within the Glacier - all along the northern mountains. Mother and the Queen Dowager have been working very hard for the past five years to keep the barrier stones along the northern border intact, because someone has been doing their utmost to break them.”

There’s been a line of Charter stones spread across the mountains beyond the Glacier for hundreds of years now, since the last Great Northern Treaty was signed by Torrigan III. It extends the reach of the Charter hundreds of miles north, into the clan lands and even into the dead plains beyond, or so she’s heard. They keep the worst of the wild magic in the clan lands down, and strengthen the Charter in the Kingdom below as well, and the idea of someone attacking that guard is sincerely terrifying.

“This has been going on for five years,” Sansa says, “and no one thought to tell me?”

“Mother didn’t want to distract you from school,” he admits. “But you need to know now, because whatever this thing is, Shadow Hands seem to flock to it, and because the last Stone it hit was right by the Glacier. We’re worried that you’re going to be targeted again when you visit.”

That’s fair enough, she supposes, although she would have liked to have been _told_ why Mother was so cool on the idea of her summering in the Glacier.

“So what do we do?” she asks, because no matter how much better she’s gotten with her pipes and no matter how much of the Book she’s read, Robb’s Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and she has to bow to his lead. “I don’t know anything about this creature that’s doing the killings, so I don’t know what to look for here.”

“The creature up north takes Charter mages,” he says. “And seems to have a knack for finding the good ones - this isn’t the same thing, I don’t think, but it might be a subordinate. A second.”

“A lieutenant,” Sansa says. “Is this thing doing the killing so intelligent?”

The smarter the Dead thing, the more dangerous it is, and Sansa’s never come up against anything more intelligent than a Mordicant. Well, except for the Stilken, obviously, but Stilkens have a sort of animal intelligence different to that of Dead things. Sansa’s done enough reading to know the difference, and that difference is making her queasy.

“We think there might be two of them,” Robb says. “But Mother and the Queen Dowager have never managed to catch whatever it is, so we can’t be sure.”

Sansa sets her jaw, just to keep herself from saying anything rash.

“I spend at least a week every summer in the Glacier, Robb,” she says. “I should have been told.”

“I thought so,” he agrees, “but Mother said no. She thought she’d be able to get it put down before we had to tell you, but-”

“But no such luck. Alright. What are we doing now, then?”

“Wyn’s given me the latest map of the area,” Robb says, tossing down a Charter-marked tablet of smooth white marble onto the table, and waving his hand over it to activate the map. It shone bright golden-white for a moment before settling into slightly translucent greens and browns and blues, and Sansa blinked rapidly to adjust her eyes. “She says that the deaths have been here, here, and here, but that their Charter stone is here.”

The murder sites show up bright orange on the map, and the stone in the centre of the town glows pink. The murder sites are all at least two miles from the stone, but the two on the sandstone face are right within spitting distance of the sinkhole.

“The stone isn’t the town’s only source of magic,” Sansa says, setting a small white marker over the sinkhole. “Robb, what if-”

His mouth is as twisted as her own feels. Robb looks afraid, though, whereas Sansa just feels sick.

“We have to go down, don’t we?” he says. “Into the shipyard.”

Down among hundreds of dead royals, every one of them bound with all the magic the Abhorsens and the Wallmakers have been able to pour into the sinkhole over hundreds and hundreds and _thousands_ of years. The pain in Sansa’s teeth spikes just at the idea of it, but if Abhorsen Sabriel could do it with hardly any training, no Wallmakers supporting her, and with only Mogget for company, Sansa supposes that she can do it with Robb at her side.

“We’ll need permission from the Manderlys,” she says. “And from the King, in theory-”

“Fuck the King,” Robb says. “We can consider this payback for his refusal to approve Jon and Wylla’s engagement.”

“He refused them permission?” Sansa gasps, horrified - Jon’s father is a fool, but he’s a fool who generally allows Jon to do as he pleases, because that means the royal bastard keeps a low profile. To refuse Jon permission to marry into a family like the Manderlys means the King has plans, or he’s trying to cause trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“So we’re going to see Lord Wyman,” Robb says, “and we’re going into the sinkhole.”

He touches something around his neck - Bran’s flower, maybe? - and sighs.

“Charter preserve us,” he says, and Sansa can’t help but agree.


End file.
